


All That And A String Of Jewels, Too

by CyanideBreathmint



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sugar Daddy, Daddy Kink, Double Penetration, Eventual Threesome, Food Porn, Multi, Smut, Suit Porn, and ren is hux's artist boyfriend, art wank, but not without friendship, content warning: a character has a ptsd flashback, content warning: age differential and power imbalance, content warning: allusions to post-traumatic stress disorder, content warning: chronic pain, content warning: discussion of rape culture, content warning: discussion of tentacle porn, content warning: frank discussions of sexual assault, content warning: gore, content warning: i hate charles saatchi and spend a lot of time bashing him in ch1, content warning: margaret thatcher, content warning: medical descriptions of serious injuries, content warning: mentions of abusive parents, content warning: someone gets hit by a truck, content warning: unromanticized discussions of sex work, content warning: violence, explorations of the boundaries of intimacy, fragrance porn, hux is rey's filthy rich sugar daddy, literary allusions galore, love without sex, rey is a starving art student who works as an escort, sex without love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-07 08:07:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 44,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13430520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: Rey is a ferociously talented and driven art student attending Goldsmiths, and she has turned to sex work to make ends meet under the burdens of her tuition fees and the high cost of living in London. She catches the eye of the coldly handsome multi-millionaire Armitage Hux, who offers to pay for her university education if she enters a sugar daddy arrangement with him. Then she meets his boyfriend, wayward artist Kylo Ren, one of her own influences, and tensions start to build as she realizes that her body belongs to Hux, but her heart might belong with Ren.Please heed the content warnings in the tags and the notes before every chapter. I am under no obligation to censor my own writing to suit your tastes. If you are triggered by anything in those warnings, then don't read it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: unromanticized discussions of sex work  
> Content warning: frank discussions of sexual assault  
> Content warning: Margaret Thatcher  
> Content warning: I hate Charles Saatchi and spend a lot of time bashing him in Chapter 1  
> Content warning: Age differential and power imbalance  
> Content warning: mentions of abusive parents  
> Content warning: Allusions to post-traumatic stress disorder
> 
> \---
> 
> I started writing this meaning to do a sleazy pwp threesome for the Reylux Not-Bang, and what happened instead is they grew personalities, backgrounds and emotions, and now I have this ... thing. It's oddly sweet and romantic, for all that it begins with one of the smuttiest scenes I've ever written in my career of fic writing.

“Tell me about your boyfriend,” Rey asked with her sweetest smile as she leaned back against a minimal ice-blue couch, a steaming cup of tea in her hand. The drink smelled of bergamot and tannin, and its heat rose to caress the skin of her chin and cheeks as she took a careful sip. Her shoes lay carelessly at the foot of her couch, where she had kicked them off earlier. They looked good, but were uncomfortable as hell, and she resolved never to buy shoes online again, for the nth time. 

“My boyfriend,” her companion said as he glanced up at her face, at her large dark eyes and the set of her nose, the stubbornness of her mouth. “He’s terribly American, I’m afraid. Wayward. Rather a lot to handle, in more ways than one.” 

“And I’m a smaller handful?” she asked, hiding her smile of amusement behind her cup of tea as she glanced beneath her eyelashes at the man sitting before her in a leather armchair.

“Physically, yes,” Armitage Hux said. He leaned casually back in his armchair, his pearl gray suit gleaming almost against the black leather upholstery. It was an optical illusion caused by the contrast in values, but it flattered his Wedgwood complexion and set off the coppery brightness of his hair. “Personality-wise? I’d say you’re quite a match for him.” Hux’s eyes had wandered away from her face to the way she had tucked her stockinged legs beneath her as she sat on the couch, the hem of her beryl-colored dress hiked up oh-so-elegantly in a calculated act of déshabillé. 

“You’re not paying me to be milk-mouthed and sweet,” she said. She put the cup of tea down on the coffee table between them, watched the cigarette smoldering gently on the end of his silver cigarette holder. She stood up and stepped around the table on her stocking feet to perch easily on the arm of his chair, to his left. 

“No. I retain you for the pleasure of your company, and all that it entails,” Hux murmured. He tapped the ash off his cigarette into an elegant blown-glass bowl repurposed perversely into an ashtray, and took another pull at it. The cherry blazed bright against the thinning late afternoon sun, and he favored her with a cold little smile. “I would be dreadfully bored if you weren’t already intelligent, independent and quite aware of what you want in your life and my bed.” Rey wasn’t fond of smokers, did not like the smell of stale tobacco smoke lingering in their presences, but as far as she knew Hux smoked only before, and sometimes after appointments with her. It was part of the ritual.

“Flatterer,” Rey said, and then she laughed quietly as his left arm slipped around her hip to take a careful hold of her. His grip was steadying rather than possessive, kind despite his affectations of aloofness and hauteur. Armitage Hux was the first and only gentleman Rey had experience with in her fledgeling career as an escort and “sugar baby”, but he was by far a shining example of virtue compared to some of the horror stories she had seen circulating on Internet forums. 

Hux’s expectations for Rey were simple and uncomplicated. They would meet for dinner or tea once or twice a week and have a stimulating conversation or two. He would discuss news, politics, the current novel he was reading in between all the other things he was doing, and he expected her to have informed, intelligent opinions about all of those. The sex that usually followed was intense, ridiculously good to her limited perspectives, but more than once all he had wanted to do was talk and be held for the next two hours, and that had been entirely fine by her. In return he paid her a sizeable stipend that she applied directly to her tuition fees, and presented her the occasional valuable gift. 

Rey had protested those presents at first, pointing out that their arrangement had only covered her university tuition, but she soon stopped when she realized that those costly indulgences were his way of expressing his affection for her. She wondered sometimes about the kind of childhood Hux had, that the only way he could make himself vulnerable enough to voice his innermost thoughts and show his generosity and love was through a sugar daddy arrangement, but he was still relatively young, very handsome and an incredible shag, and she had decided months ago not to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

On the afternoons where Hux only wanted her closeness she would lie naked next to him and caress the bruises dappling his skin over his narrow, bony hips and clustered on his pale neck under the collar line of his shirt. He would settle into her embrace and sigh contentedly, the tension seeping out of him bit by bit as she ran the tips of her fingernails across his exposed skin, pressed herself against his side. Rey asked him a week ago if he was safe - worried he had turned to her for comfort in an abusive relationship, but he had merely chuckled and mentioned that his boyfriend was rather vigorous in his ardor. The thought of this cold, controlled man being held down and fucked roughly turned her on so much that she wound up bringing herself off next to Hux in bed. He had laughed gently at the predictable effect his personal scandals had on her, kissed her indulgently again and again, and held her safely in his arms as she shuddered and came. 

Today it was clear that Hux’s thoughts were rather more lustful than intellectual. He put the cigarette out with a quiet sigh and left the butt and the holder resting in the glass bowl, and then slowly began to ruck Rey’s skirt up with his right hand. She had taken care to wear one of the pairs of the silk stockings he had gifted her, knowing his preferences and tastes, and his eyelids fluttered softly shut as his fingertips found the lace at their tops, brushed past to find the skin of her upper thigh and trace the suspenders that held the stockings up. 

Rey reached down to caress Hux’s head with the fingers of her right hand, her nails teasing gently at the nape of his neck, and she felt him lean into her touch, content for the moment to be treated gently. Hux’s fingertips found the bare skin beneath the suspender belt Rey was wearing and she shivered at the lightness of his touch, gasped as he dipped his hand between her thighs to splay across the soft thatch of her pubic hair. Hux opened his eyes and looked up at her, chuckled softly at her reaction as he started to play idly with her, his fingers tracing slow circles over the hood of her clitoris. 

“So tell me more about him,” Rey whispered in between gasps, glancing hotly down at the tenting distorting Hux’s trouser fly, “what is he like? Besides American, of course.”  


Hux pressed his lips to the curve of her lower back, his fingers still busy. “He’s taller than I am. Broad-chested, he works out. Dark, like you, but fairer in the complexion, paler. He doesn’t get that much sun. And I could fall forever into his eyes.” 

“And you -” Rey gasped again as Hux did something else very clever with his right hand, “you still want me around when you have a dreamboat like that at your beck and call?” The heat building between her thighs was spreading up her spine, rising up within her to flush her face and neck, and the dress she was wearing felt suddenly confining against her skin. 

Hux sighed softly, wistfully, and for a moment Rey froze, afraid that she had offended him, but he continued caressing her gently. “Well, he’s not always here with me,” Hux said after a few moments of silence, “he spends a lot of time in other countries, putting on his gallery showings and doing artists’ residencies.” 

“Mmh.” Rey began to unfasten the buttons on the front of her dress, palmed herself through the filmy cup of her bra and shuddered at the sensation as Hux’s ministrations continued to work their effect on her. 

“So he knows about this arrangement?” she asked. She wouldn’t ordinarily have pegged Hux as the type of man to fancy artistic types, but here he was talking about his mysterious boyfriend’s artist residencies and paying for her BFA. 

“He knows and he’s happy as long as I’m happy, and I don’t feel the need to question him about the people he shags when he isn’t in London. He’s asked about you, you know.” Hux paused in his attentions and let Rey swing herself off the arm of the chair, and she climbed onto the seat facing him, her knees bracketing his narrow thighs.

“For wank material?” Rey asked him as she continued to work her way down the placket of her dress. 

“No,” Hux laughed softly again, squeezed gently on her hips with both his hands, “no, he’s a romantic. He wants to paint a portrait. He thinks of you as a modern-day counterpart to the Venetian courtesans of ages past.” 

Rey groaned softly as Hux spread his fingers over the firm curves of her arse, felt him caress the sensitive skin just under her buttocks. “Nobody taught me how to eat an ortolan, though,” she said when she had caught her breath.

“I consider that an improvement on the traditional curriculum,” Hux said drily. He slipped his right hand between her legs again, and she shuddered silently as he continued rubbing at her vulva, bringing her slowly to a boil. “Those little creatures simply want to live and be free. It seems a terrible sin to blind them merely to fatten them for the table and drown them in Armagnac. I prefer my songbirds alive and singing for me.” 

“Am I your little songbird then, Armitage Hux?” Rey breathed, and she gasped as he buried his face in the shallow valley between her modest breasts, found her clitoris with his thumb as he slipped his fingers into her and curled them.

“You could be, if that’s what you want to be called,” he murmured against her skin, sounding pleased at the effect he had on her, “but you come to my bed willingly for what I give, and you sing so sweetly under my hands.” He curled his fingers again, and she ground herself down hard on the pad of his thumb, let out a small cry of pleasure. “And I would never cage you,” he continued, his breath hot against her flushed skin. “You could walk out right now, and I would continue paying your tuition until you graduated, just as I promised.” His movements quickened, and his touch was now like fire against her clit, each swipe of his thumb tingling sweetly through her skin, through her nerves, into the deepest core of her.

“Please,” Rey gasped as he nibbled at her breast through translucent lace, let his teeth scrape so softly over the thin fabric. She rocked against his hand as he slowed again, feeling the tension growing and building in her. She was clenching around his fingers so hard now, desperate for every bit of sensation she could eke out of his touch. 

Hux tugged left-handed at her bra as he continued playing with her, slipping the right shoulder strap down her arm to expose her breast. The cold air felt like a caress against her heated skin, and she whimpered in delight as he bent his head to the strawberries and cream of her small, pert nipple to tease it gently with his tongue. His teeth were cold compared to his breath, the velvet of his tongue, and he nibbled at her just a little too hard for comfort, and that was it. 

Rey tipped over the edge with a wordless cry of relief, and Hux slowed his right hand, let her catch her breath as she shivered around his strong fingers. She arched her back, pushing her breasts out towards his face, and he continued to tongue her nipple, suckling at her as though she were a sacrament, her flesh transubstantiated into an exotic drug.

She could feel herself dripping down her inner thighs, the tops of her stockings wet from her spendings. She thought of Hux’s shirt cuff soaking in her juices, imagined him pressing his face to it, inhaling her scent after she had gone, and she groaned at the thrum of adrenaline in the pit of her belly, the aching heat rising again up her spine.

“Please what, my dear?” Hux asked as he lifted his face away from her bosom, teasing gently. Rey felt him shift a little to relieve the pressure on his cock, and then he pulled his fingers out of her, held them up to her lips. She sucked desperately at his skin, the salty-sweet taste of herself strong under the sharp tang of his sweat, and he hissed softly as she lapped her way down the palm of his hand. 

“I want you to fuck me,” she panted, _“Daddy.”_ She felt him twitch and shiver beneath her, his hips bucking instinctively upward, heard him laugh softly afterwards. 

“And how would you like me to fuck you, hm?” Hux whispered softly against her ear as she let herself sink down astride his lap, the wool of his trousers slightly rough against the sensitive skin on the backs of her thighs, between them. 

“I don’t care,” Rey laughed, hissed softly as he rocked up against the folds of her cunt, letting the horn buttons on his fly press momentarily against her flesh. “Any way you want. I just want your prick in me.” It turned her on immensely to know that she was smearing her wetness all over his bespoke Savile Row suit, and that he would let her mark him so. 

“I think we can do that, yes,” Hux murmured indulgently. He pushed a lock of hair off her sweaty brow, kissed her on the chin. “You’ve been a good girl, haven’t you?” 

Rey returned the kiss. She sucked at his full lower lip and worried gently at it with her teeth. “No, no, I haven’t. Why else would I be here with you?” 

“You minx.” Hux pushed her gently off his lap and stood. He took her hands to steady her as she put her feet onto the carpeted floor, and then removed his coat to reveal his waistcoat, left it draped over an arm of the couch. Rey worked at the buttons of his waistcoat, her dress hanging open from her shoulders like a robe, and then his hands were around her waist as she began to slide her knee up between his legs. 

“Tell me about your boyfriend while you’re fucking me,” Rey said as she grabbed him by the sumptuous silk of his loosened necktie, tugged him towards the bedroom. She was too impatient, too pent-up to wait any longer despite the relief he had granted her mere moments earlier. 

“You seem quite taken with the idea of me riding another man’s cock.” Hux mused as he let her bring him to heel, like a well-trained dog on a leash. He followed her meekly to his bedroom, his eyes fixed on her, on the sliver of skin visible between the unbuttoned edges of her dress. A slip of pink here and there as she moved, the curl of her pubic hair dark against her skin. 

Rey laughed despite herself, felt her mouth begin to go dry as they stepped over the threshold to his bedroom, her bare feet first, and then his elegant Italian loafers. “That’s what reams of smutty fanfiction are written about,” she told him. “Never looked up Harry/Draco?” Rey remembered the bad Harry Potter erotica she wrote in cheap little notebooks that she hoarded, line after line scrawled in her cramped hand as she bounced from foster home to boarding school. Those notebooks were the only consistent thing she had in her adolescence, and she kept them still despite their cringey contents because of what they meant to her.

“Alas,” Hux shook his head gently as he took the initiative, began to crowd her towards his bed. “I spent my misbegotten youth in rather less entertaining pursuits.” He stopped short of pushing her onto the bed, waited for her to sit down instead, which she did. 

“Such as?” Rey asked, shrugging her dress off her shoulders before she reached behind her to unclasp her bra. She kept the stockings and the suspender belt on, however, knowing how much Hux liked the feel of silk and lace against his skin. 

Hux stepped out of his shoes, squirmed out of his waistcoat, and Rey smiled to see that the fabric of his shirt was already soaked through with sweat. “Cricket and polo,” he said, “and I hated them both, but appearances had to be kept up.” He worked the cufflinks on his shirt sleeves while she busied herself with the remaining buttons on his shirt, the ones inaccessible to her previously. 

“I should have known you also fancied men from the very start,” Rey laughed, oddly joyful at the way he slipped out of his braces, at the hiss and grind as she began to unbutton his trousers. “You went to public school.” 

“I was always a day student, though.” Hux huffed softly in amusement, let his eyes close as she tugged his trousers down, palmed the underside of his cock through the slippery silk of his boxers. “Enough,” he told her after a few moments of teasing, “give me a little room, Rey.” 

She did, scooting back in bed until her back was against the headboard, plush down pillows soft against her skin, and he was climbing into bed with her, kicking his trousers off to reveal the dress socks he wore, held up his slender calves with sock suspenders. His shirt came off his body as though in a molt, and he rolled over onto his back and let Rey help him with his socks and suspenders before he wriggled easily out of his boxers. 

Hux was strangely vulnerable without his layers of suiting, slender, scarred and fragile without the wool and canvas and horsehair that built his minimal frame up to something more imposing. He was much less intimidating naked like this, his cock erect in salute and dark with blood against the bright copper of his pubic hair. Although it wasn’t as though Rey was intimidated by him at this point. There had been nerves during their first few assignations, but he had always been kind and indulgent, respectful of her boundaries and her consent. 

“It’s always been a fantasy of mine, you know,” she told him as he rolled onto his side to watch her settle herself comfortably on top of the duvet. “Having two men at the same time, I mean.”  


“And that explains your interest in my boyfriend?” Hux asked her. He shifted his position minutely, let her throw a leg over his hip before he pressed his lips to the delicate skin of her neck, nipped gently at the edge of her jawline.

“Partly,” Rey gasped. She reached down between her legs, fingers parting the damp curl of her pubic hair before she found her clitoris and began teasing herself slowly. She was so pent up right now, and Hux looked as though he wanted to take things slowly today. 

“What’s the rest of it, then?” he asked her, running his right hand down over her flank in a firm, gentle caress as her breathing began to quicken again. His cool green gaze remained fixed on her face, on the way she bit her lip against the pleasure of her self-abuse. 

“The marks he leaves on you,” Rey groaned, shivered as he silenced her with a kiss, his mouth hot and wet, his tongue velvety against hers. “He must fuck like he’s starving for you, like he’s eating you alive,” she breathed against his lips when he let her up for air. 

“That he does,” Hux said, indulging her very greatly, “You must like the visual of me begging, on all fours, for his cock,” he murmured against her shoulder as she began to pant like a doe evading hound and hunter alike, and she groaned again as he reached down to slide his fingers inside her cunt again. She tensed up around him, hissed, and then he pulled away from her, and she bucked futilely against him. 

“Fuck, yes,” Rey whimpered against the sensation, against the visual all too real in the back of her head. “Is that something you both do?”

“Sometimes, yes. Other times I tie him down and make him beg instead,” Hux pushed his fingers back into her, three of them this time, and she shuddered reflexively around them. “Or I fuck his slutty mouth,” he continued, curling his fingers in her, “and leave his face smeared with spunk, wipe myself off on his hair.” 

That brought Rey off with a shout of surprise, and he fucked her hard with his fingers, worked her through the sweetly aching spasms of her orgasm until her breathing slowed again. “That was impressive,” he told her, chuckled softly. 

“Yes,” she managed to laugh breathlessly, “it is. It’s such a turn-on.” 

“Mhm,” Hux kissed her on the forehead, on the bridge of her nose, let his lips linger against hers. “I’m almost tempted to give him a call and ask him if he’d come over for an hour or two,” he whispered against her mouth, “but he’s in Helsinki right now, and I don’t think you can wait for him to get on his plane and arrive later today at Heathrow.” 

“No,” Rey squirmed, excited at the thought of Hux ordering her to wait, felt her toes curl against the duvet, “no, I can’t.” 

“Neither can I,” Hux confessed. He reached down to stroke his cock slowly, squeezing gently at the base, cupping his scrotum momentarily. “Fortunately I might be able to - hm, make up for deficiencies this time.” 

“What kinds of deficiencies?” Rey asked, genuinely curious.

“Most men are unfortunately furnished with but one member, and necessity breeds invention. Invention and innovation.” He rolled briefly away from her and rummaged in the top drawer of the nightstand to his side. He pulled three items out. A foil-wrapped condom, a small bottle of lubricant, and an impressive-looking dildo. The device ended in a sizeable finger loop instead of the usual flared base, and Rey squirmed at the thought of Hux employing it upon himself. 

“Is that what you use on yourself when you miss your boyfriend?” she asked Hux, wondering if its dimensions were an accurate reflection of his boyfriend’s endowment. He was a very lucky man, if they did.

“Sometimes. I could help you fulfil that fantasy of yours with its help, you know,” Hux said. He took the toy in his hands, let his touch warm it minutely as he spoke. “I could slide this in you, and also fuck you up the arse. Show you what it feels like, in any event. Don’t worry about where it’s been before, I always bleach my toys after use. Would you like me to do that, Rey?” 

“Definitely,” she said. Hux’s frankness about such matters was rather comforting. It meant that she knew what to expect from him, and also that she could veto suggestions that did not interest her, although that had not happened yet in their arrangement. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she added, just a little hesitant. 

“We’ll go softly. Slowly. Lift your hips for me, just a little.” Rey complied, and Hux tucked a pillow under her arse to tilt her to the right angle. “Let’s see how you enjoy a little anal stimulation, without the toy. I don’t want to overdo it until I know what feels good for you.” 

Hux left the silicone toy lying on the bed beside Rey’s left leg, and picked up the condom and lubricant instead. He smeared a small amount of lube on his fingers, rubbed it into the head of his cock, and Rey watched the hitch in his breath as he stroked himself, saw the muscles of his thighs tense up. “Let me help you with that,” she told him, before he could pick the condom up off the sheets. “Your hands are all slippery now.” 

“Thank you.” Hux handed the foil square over to her, grinned briefly as she tore a strip off the side of the packaging, and then she handed it back to him. He plucked the condom out of the packaging itself, pinched down on the reservoir tip and then rolled it expertly down the shaft of his cock. Some people felt as though condoms ruined the spontaneity of a good shag, but Rey had always found it a turn on, a delicious prelude to what came next. 

That done, Hux squeezed more lubricant onto his hand, pressed his slippery fingers against the bud of her arsehole. She tried to open herself to him, exhaled and tried to relax, but he paused. “Not now,” he told her, “let’s just try a little massage.” His strong fingers rubbed gentle circles over the tight ring of muscle, and she gasped and squirmed against him, reached down to tease her own nipples as he let the very tip of his finger probe her. 

“Do you like that?” he asked, and she nodded, whined when he pulled his hand away to lubricate it further. “I’m going to put a finger in you now,” he said, “just one. Tell me if it hurts. Breathe.” She inhaled deeply and shivered as he pushed her right thigh up with his left hand to expose her further, and then he was pushing at her with the tip of his index finger, sliding it slippery into her. She felt the muscle of her asshole stretch around him, exhaled as she got used to the sensation, but then shuddered as she felt him pressing gently against her inner sphincter. 

“Does this feel good?” he asked her, and she moaned, her head thrown back in delight as he caressed her internally. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said continuing his careful ministrations. Rey knew intellectually that the rectum was filled with nerve endings, that sticking things up her arse could feel good, but she had never really tried on her own. The slimmest toy she owned seemed intimidatingly large against her anus the one time she had made an attempt, and she eventually gave up and finished herself off the old-fashioned way instead. 

This was by far a better initiation than she could have ever hoped for, and she whimpered as Hux pushed his finger past the loosening ring of her inner sphincter, up and up into her. Then he began to slide it in and out of her, and she forgot all about her previous train of thought as she gave herself over to the pleasure building hotly within. 

“A second finger now,” he told her, “I’ll go slowly as before.” Hux paused to stroke his own cock through the thin latex of the condom to grant himself a temporary relief as he finger-fucked her, and she could only moan again, her hands closing on the duvet beneath her, when he slipped his middle and index fingers into her. He was a bit rougher this time, but the stretch and burn felt so very good, the friction singing hotly through her nerves like the flush of heat after a dram of whisky.

“Shall I use a third now?” he asked her, curling and spreading his fingers alternately inside her. 

“Yes,” she cried, sighed as he pulled away to wet his hand with lubricant again. 

“That was how I learned it, you know,” Hux mentioned casually as he began to push against her arsehole again. “My first lover was - very patient with me.” The third finger hurt a little, stretching her to the point of pain, but he worked slowly at her until she began to relax around him. She had been wet from her earlier orgasms, but now she was so aroused that she was dripping again, her juices trickling out of her cunt to slick Hux’s fingers further and soak into the pillow beneath her hips. 

“Was he nice?” Rey asked Hux, whimpered a little as he slid his fingers further into her.

“She, actually,” Hux said, “and she wasn’t all that nice outside the boudoir. I thought she loved me, but I was just another cute young thing for her trophy collection. The sex was brilliant, though, so here we are. All right. Another deep breath. I’m going to use the toy on you now.” He reached down to pick the dildo up left-handed, sliding his index finger into the loop, and Rey inhaled, held it as he slid the fat head of the toy between the slick folds of her vulva, wetting it well before he pushed it into her. 

The sensation was breathtaking, and she arched into it as he pushed the toy smoothly up her cunt, moaned loudly, involuntarily as its head caught the bump of her G-spot and stretched her fully open. “More,” she begged hoarsely when she found her tongue afterwards, “I want more.” 

“I can give you that, but don’t set your expectations too high,” Hux laughed, “I’m not sure how long I’m going to last like this.” 

“Why?” Rey hissed as he pulled his fingers free of her, and he worked the dildo slowly in and out of her for a few moments as she caught her breath.

“I can feel it through you, you know,” he told her matter-of-factly, “the toy, I mean. I’ll be rubbing myself against it inside you, through the thin wall parting your cunt and your arsehole.” 

That was not something Rey had thought about, but it made sense. “That’d also apply to another man’s prick, wouldn’t it?” she asked.

“It does, and it feels ridiculously good.” Hux said drily. He did not elaborate further as he pulled the toy all the way out of Rey and left it wet and sticky on the soft skin of her belly. The silicone was almost shockingly warm against her flesh, and she thought of how it must feel for Hux to be inside her, felt her pulse quicken at at that little glimpse into his side of the experience. He opened the bottle of lubricant again and squeezed another dollop out, this time onto the head of his sheathed cock, and spread it over the thin latex of the condom. 

“I want you in me so badly,” Rey whispered as he began to lean over her, and then she gasped as he propped her legs up against his shoulders. 

“You’ll have it, my greedy little songbird,” he reassured her, “you’ll have all of it in just a moment.” He rolled his hips carefully, pushing the head of his cock against her arsehole, now lax with pleasure and dripping with lubricant, and then rocked himself slowly into her with short shallow thrusts. She groaned as he stretched her open again, felt his cock push past the tight rings of muscle into what felt like the pit of her belly, and then he held himself very still, trembling against the velvety heat of her. 

“Your cock feels so good in me like this,” Rey whispered as he leaned into her, bending her almost double, and he shivered, bit down hard on his lower lip. “Put the toy in me. I want to be filled up.”

“You’re insatiable,” Hux groaned, and she shivered too at the effect she was having on him, moaned loudly as he picked the slippery dildo off her belly and pressed its head gently against her cunt, eased it slowly into her. She watched his eyes flutter shut as he slid it into her, stretching her open and leaving her deliciously full. 

“Fuck,” Rey whispered as he seated the toy carefully in her, shifted against her arse so that its ringed end pressed softly against his pubic bone. That had the effect of holding the dildo in her no matter how wet she got, and then she shouted when he started to thrust up into her arse. Each stroke drove the toy deeper into her, and then let it slide back out as he pulled back. The sensation was incredible, overwhelming, and she could feel another orgasm building in her arse, in that secret spot deep in her cunt that ached so sweetly under pressure, heat and light climbing up her spine to consume her brain in fire. “Daddy,” she moaned as Hux paced himself carefully, laboring over her, _“Daddy,_ I’m coming, I’m _coming.”_

“Darling,” he panted over her cries, “darling, come for me.” Rey screamed this time, the world dissolving into static behind her eyelids, and she shook with the intensity of Hux’s eager thrusts, her teeth chattering in her head. He was pushing the dildo so deep in her, pressing its large head almost painfully against her, and she howled incoherently as she came again. 

Hux’s breathing was heavy and hard, his eyes half-closed as he watched her climax again and again, and she felt his hips stuttering as he got closer to his own orgasm. “I’m close,” he breathed, “need to slow down.” 

“What is it like, fucking me like this?” Rey asked, knowing the effect it would have on him, and then she whimpered as he bucked reflexively upwards against her. “You told me -” she moaned then against the sensation of his cock driving home up her arse, “you told me how you can feel the toy too.” 

“You’re so hot and soft, up your arse, it’s like fucking - like fucking velvet. And I can feel the toy inside you, and it’s rubbing up against the head of my cock every time I push it into you. It’s so good, so good like this,” Hux groaned as he rode the wave of his own pleasure, his own fingers closing desperately on the duvet under her. “When I’m fucking a girl with another man like this,” he continued, “I can - I can feel him coming inside her, his cock beating, twitching against mine with each spurt of come.” 

That was more than enough to send Rey over the brink one last time, and she let herself fall forever as the world fuzzed out around her, receding into darkness as her sensorium narrowed to the eager rut of Hux’s prick deep in her, of the dildo sliding up to the hilt in her cunt. Both flesh and silicone were delightful to clench against as she tensed up, her cunt fluttering as she came. Hux’s thrusts grew faster, more desperate against her in the wake of her climax, and he spilled himself into her with a soft _“Ah,”_ of relief, trembling as he held very still in her, grinding out the last tremors of his orgasm against her tender arse.

\---

“Fuck,” Rey said a few minutes later, after she had caught her breath lying bonelessly next to Hux. They were both sweaty, covered with lubricant, and Hux had managed only to pull his condom off and knot its open end before he fell into bed beside her. The dildo lay atop the duvet, between her legs where Hux had left it just moments ago.

“No thank you,” Hux sighed tiredly, with a little breathless laugh, “not right now.” 

“You silly man,” Rey murmured, smiling at his little joke, “that was very good.” 

“Good.” Hux let his eyes close in contentment, his hands loosely curled at his sides, and he squeezed gently back when Rey took his left hand in her right.

“I was going to go home after this,” she breathed, “but I don’t think I can feel my legs well enough to walk up the stairs to my flat.”

“Do you have any pressing appointments?” he asked her seriously, as though she had not been joking.

Rey fought through the fuzz of endorphins clouding her mind. The only deadlines she had not met yet were an essay due in on Monday and a drawing assignment for Wednesday’s class and she could take care of those over the weekend, tomorrow and day after. “Not today,” she said. She rolled over in bed and snuggled herself up to Hux, pressed her forehead against his bicep. 

“Then stay,” he said softly as Rey placed her left palm over his heart to feel his pulse, reached up right-handed to close his fingers over hers. “Rest here with me. I’ll book reservations for dinner, and I can drive you home afterwards, before I have to pick Ren up at the airport.” 

Rey froze at the name, blinked as her memory attached a face to it, collated it against the descriptive details Hux had shared with her earlier. “Your boyfriend is Kylo Ren,” she said. It was not a question.  


“Yes, yes he is,” Hux laughed softly as Rey lifted her head from his shoulder to look him in the eye. “I should have known you were familiar with him, being an artist yourself.” He was relaxed, more amused than anything else and also, Rey thought, quietly pleased at her erudition and knowledge. 

She thought Hux’s regard slightly excessive in this case. One didn’t need to know that much about art to know who Kylo Ren was. A draftsman, photographer, printmaker, and painter, Ren had been declared the second coming of Damien Hirst in a Guardian editorial two or three years back. Rey disagreed with that article entirely on a personal and academic level. Ren’s work felt much closer to a hypothetical love child of Jasper Johns and Robert Mapplethorpe than the general oeuvre of the Young British Artists who, for better or for worse, had been propped up by Charles Saatchi’s pocketbook. Rey also personally thought that Saatchi’s influence on the British art scene was ultimately a distortion, the gravity well of his wealth and influence bent its output to his taste and whims for two decades and counting, and Saatchi was an abusive waste of skin besides.

“Kylo Ren’s a fit piece of crumpet,” she said with a sly grin, remembering exactly how he looked, tall and deliberate in monochrome as he stood behind a lectern and explained his process and inspiration to a group of infatuated artists. “He gave a talk at my uni two months ago, and I think three-quarters of the students present were recording it to wank to afterwards. He has such a sexy voice, deep and warm.” She had never seen a human being look so much like a piece of Brutalist architecture before, all broad shoulders and vertical lines, clad in a charcoal gray pinstripe coat over faded black jeans and a Joy Division t-shirt. It would have been unbearably stark if not for the softness of his hair, which he wore down to his shoulders in thick, unruly waves. 

“So did you, I assume,” Hux murmured indulgently, and he began to caress her cheek gently as she laid her head back down against his shoulder. 

“No,” she said, “not when I already have my arrangement with you. But it was tempting.” They were both cooling down from their former exertions, and she shivered briefly against the cool air against her skin.

“You don’t have to keep yourself solely for my pleasure, you know,” Hux said softly, just a little sadly, “that’s not part of the arrangement.” He pulled her closer to him as he felt her shiver and she tucked her left leg over his as she squirmed against his side.

“No, I don’t, but I have studio classes and homework and not enough time and energy to spend on rubbing one out on school days, and you always leave me satisfied,” Rey said with a little grin as she warmed herself against Hux’s flesh. “I’d like to meet Ren, though.” 

“He’s probably going to be too tired to fuck either one of us, if that’s what you’re interested in,” Hux said jokingly, gently, and he pressed a kiss the crown of her head, pressed his raspberry mouth to her dark brown hair. 

“It’s not.” Rey’s intellect was engaged more than her desires at this point. She wanted to speak more with Ren, who had struck her as a clever, thoughtful man, albeit one who was rather indulgent of his sizeable ego. But then it wasn’t as though Ren lacked a reason for coddling his ego - so much of his work was autobiographical, confessional, and he purposefully blurred the lines between his selfhood and the image he built up as an artist. It was the psychic equivalent of bleeding into the paint he used on his canvases, a purposeful obliteration of the self to build up something stranger, greater and at once sacred and profane. “Why don’t we have supper with him, after you pick him up from Heathrow?” she continued. “We could skip dinner. You could introduce us then, and he can decide whether he wants to paint that portrait of me after all.” 

“Let me send him a message and see if he wants to,” Hux said. He shifted against Rey, and she rolled back over as he sat up in bed and padded silently to its foot, to collect his cell phone from the trousers he had left discarded on the floor. “He might want nothing more than to fall into bed once he arrives.”

“That’s also fine with me,” Rey laughed. “I’m sure he’s just as pretty sleeping as he is awake.” 

“That he is,” Hux agreed.

\---

Rey napped intermittently for an hour or two, tucked safely away in Hux’s immense bed as he sat up reading beside her, her back pressed against the warmth and solidity of his hip and thigh. It wasn’t fiction this time - he sometimes read to her and vice versa - but something connected to his work, which he never spoke about when he was with her. She knew better than to ask, but she had done her own research in the week after he had made his initial proposal to her _vis-á-vis_ her university tuition. 

The Huxes bore no title - at least, none that would show up in official peerages. The left-wing press, however, had dubbed Hux’s father the Baron of Death, and Brendol Hux had presided over a small empire of death and desolation in his vocation as a weapons dealer. It had been rumored that he had been indirectly responsible for several government coups and dozens of smaller unrests, but nobody had been able to pin anything officially to him. Brendol had gone to his grave in 2010 with an MBE and the friendships of Margaret Thatcher, and her son Mark, among other shadowy, powerful individuals.

Armitage Hux had done only one thing with his controlling stake in his late father’s business empire. He dissolved the company and liquidated its assets. He affected the general manner of a dilettante playboy philanthropist, interested only in leisure and charitable deeds, but even that was a calculated thing, designed to soften the impact of his family name. He had been photographed at charity auctions, balls and soirées, the Royal Ascot, usually with a different suitable someone ornamenting his arm for each event, and had never married. 

There was another small tidbit of gossip, that Armitage Hux had gone to Sandhurst as an officer cadet after university (Oxford) and been subsequently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with the Royal Anglian Regiment. His deployment to Helmand Province was cut short by injury, and he had been medically discharged in 2008 following a long convalescence and rehabilitation. Rey had seen his scarred back and belly, souvenirs of someone’s AK-47, and he had canceled scheduled meetings with her before, citing a bad pain day.

That was all she had been able to glean in her one week of research - Hux was a man wealthy enough to buy himself almost-complete privacy in the most surveilled city in the world, and he had never spoken about his experiences in Afghanistan. Rey had been too discreet to ask about the scars, although their extent had shocked her the first time Hux had disrobed in front of her. She remembered how she had pressed her lips to them after their first fuck, trying to express with that gesture the heartsick horror she felt at the pain he must have endured, but he had pushed her face gently away, and she had not done it since.  


Rey rolled over and watched Hux from her pillow, his pupils scrolling side-to-side down the contents of a dossier and he reached absently down to caress her. He stroked her firmly and gently down the side of her neck, his palm lingering hotly on her bare shoulder for a few seconds before he shut the folder and slipped it into the locked middle drawer of his nightstand. 

“Did you sleep well?” Hux asked her, and she nodded, stretched and yawned. “We have a little time yet,” he continued as he settled down beside her in an attitude of study, “It’s a few minutes to 7. Ren’s flight is due in at 7:46, and he probably won’t be through security until 8.” 

“I’m too fucked-out for another shag, Armitage,” Rey said, and then giggled as he tweaked the tip of her nose between thumb and forefinger. 

“That was not what I had in mind, you wicked little virago,” Hux said. He let his hand drop back on top of the sheets, and Rey put her hand over his, let their fingers intertwine. “I’m not twenty any more, and I don’t think I can keep up with your energy in amatory pursuits. No, I was thinking you might want a chance to have a hot bath, since your flat comes equipped only with a shower.” 

“Mm,” Rey kissed Hux on the chin, propped herself up on an elbow. She realized then that she had actually never seen him use the immense bathtub in his flat. He had always preferred a post-coital shower instead. “You spoil me so badly. Why?” 

“Because I want to,” Hux said, just a little imperiously, “and because it pleases me to see your delight.” He began to turn the sheets aside and slipped out of bed, stood gloriously naked in the glow of his reading lamp. 

“You’re a lot softer than you pretend to be, you know,” Rey said as she took his hand, let him help her out of bed. She wriggled out from under the duvet and onto his side of the bed, the mattress still warm with his body heat, and then swung her legs over the edge. 

“Perhaps,” Hux shrugged, dodging away from the answer. “Shall I run a bath for you now?” 

“Yes,” Rey said, and she let Hux lead her to the bathroom. He started the water running and tested it with his hand while she relieved herself and flushed, and then took her hand as she stepped into the ankle-deep water in the tub. It was good and hot, and she felt the vague residual soreness of this afternoon’s exertions fade slightly from its warmth. 

“This feels so good,” she told Hux, glanced at him as he retrieved a small plastic pail from the cabinet under the sink, “I wonder why I don’t see you using it more.” 

“The reclining angle is uncomfortable for me,” Hux said as he began to fill the pail at the sink, “my vertebrae don’t quite let me do that now, not without some pain.” 

“Oh.” Rey looked up at him, remembered the scars running down his lower back, and decided not to push further. It wasn’t as though she feared him, not really after a year’s intimate acquaintance, but he always was so serious and solemn around the topic. Rey sensed a deep unhealed pain about Hux, guessed that he would prefer not to think about whatever had happened to him in Afghanistan whenever possible, and so she did not ask.

“I have several grams of surgical steel bolted into my backbone,” Hux said matter-of-factly, and that admission surprised Rey. He knelt again to retrieve a bottle of bleach from the cabinet, unscrewed its top and poured a brief splash into the bucket. “Flying is awkward, since I never pass a metal detector without setting it off.” He washed his hands in the sink, dried them on a hand towel, and then rummaged in a drawer for the cardboard box of bath bombs he kept in there solely for her use. 

“The pink one,” Rey said as he proffered the box, and Hux plucked it out easily and let it drop with a little _plop_ in the water above her lap. It fizzed and bubbled, turning over from its own effervescence several times. The attar of roses filled the bathroom, and Rey closed her eyes slowly and let herself luxuriate in the fragrance and the hot bath alike. “This is the first time you’ve told me about your back,” she said after a few seconds of silence. 

“Hm.” Hux did not sound troubled at present, only pensive. “Be right back,” he said, and she heard the slap of his feet receding as he left the bathroom. She opened her eyes to gaze up at the ceiling and sighed softly in contentment at the effect of her perfumed bath as dried rose petals came loose from the disintegrating bath bomb and began to unfurl and float to the surface of the water. 

Hux returned half a minute later with the dildo he had employed to devastating effect earlier, and he dropped it neatly in the small pail and returned the entire thing to its place in the cabinet under his sink. Rey watched Hux move with a renewed interest, saw how stiffly he moved at the waist when he knelt down on the floor with the bucket in hand. “I’m going to have a shower now,” he said after he got off his knees, clutching the bathroom counter for support as he hauled himself to his feet.

“Of course,” Rey said, trying to smile naturally at him. “I’ll just pickle myself a little more.” 

“Don’t overdo it,” Hux said, his voice attenuated slightly behind the glass of the shower stall, “or you’ll just be one big wrinkle when you’re done.”

“You like me down to the wrinkly bits, though,” Rey teased, and she heard Hux’s chuckle echo hollowly in the shower as the water hissed on.

\--- 

Rey stood waiting patiently at Hux’s side as they stood in the arrival hall at Heathrow. She had eschewed her dress and sweat-soaked stockings for comfortable flats, thermal leggings and an oversized shirt, topped with a cashmere sweater - she always kept several changes of clothing at Hux’s flat just in case she stayed the night, which she sometimes did. 

Hux had changed as well. He was now wearing a fresh shirt with a spread collar and the usual silk necktie. Both gleamed in contrast to the flecked Donegal tweed of his immaculate suit. Rey could smell his cologne from where she was standing right next to him, pine and incense and cedar, pimentos and violets. A cold scent for such a reserved man, and yet it suited him the way bespoke suits and Earl Gray tea did. 

“You’re bouncing on your feet, Rey,” Hux murmured to her as she twined her fingers together and glanced up at the screen showing recent arrivals. A BA flight from Helsinki had landed 10 minutes ago, and she wondered how long it would take for Ren to clear customs and immigration. 

“He’s a bit of - an artistic hero to me, I suppose,” Rey said, holding herself still despite the slight nerves she felt, “and I don’t know how he’ll react to… to his boyfriend’s whore, especially if he’s as much of an arse as rumor has it.” She did not know where this sudden bleakness had come from, wasn’t entirely sure why she was confessing her unease to Hux at a time like this. Then she thought about how he had trusted her enough to talk about his old injury, and resolved to trust him similarly. 

“He knows about us,” Hux reminded her. He let a hand rest on her shoulder, squeezed down briefly, and the touch reassured her. “And you should know from his oeuvre that he doesn’t have any problem with sex work or sex workers.” 

“I guess it’s intimidating.” Rey confessed, and she felt Hux’s hand drift downward to the center of her back, where it lingered, solid, comforting.

“More intimidating than I am?” he asked her with some amusement. 

“I was nervous, you know,” Rey said, staring down at her shoes, “that first time with you. You were my very first client, and I’d never done escort work before. I was afraid you’d turn out to be a serial killer, or that you might be rough with me, or force me to do something I didn’t want to do. But I guess I got used to you, I learned that you really aren’t like that.”

“And Ren?” Hux asked, coaxing the words out of her with his usual patience. 

“Well, with him it’s less like I expect him to murder me, but I want him to like me? I want to be able to talk to him about his work and his process, and I hope he won’t think of me as just some tiresome little -” Rey paused, unable to articulate her feelings further, but saying what she had was already helping, made the despair lift a little from her chest. 

“He knows who you are, you know,” Hux told her very gently, gave her a brief kiss on the brow. “I told him to look out for you when he gave the lecture at Goldsmiths, because I guessed you would be attending.” 

“Oh,” Rey said, temporarily at a loss for words. Hux let his hand drop and reached out for hers instead, and she took it gratefully, let him squeeze down on her cold fingers.

“Ren wouldn’t have been interested in having supper with you if he had a bad impression of you from the talk he gave,” Hux continued, and Rey looked back up from her shoes, into his green eyes. They were veiled with the bright ginger scraps of his eyelashes, oddly dulled by the light in the airport, and the shadows cast across his face left him looking gaunter than usual, ragged, even.

“You didn’t tell me you knew already about that talk,” she said, trying to gauge his reaction. She didn’t really think he would be upset at her pointing that out, and she genuinely wanted to know why he had lied by omission.

Hux paused and closed his eyes, sighed. “I didn’t want to give you the impression that I’m monitoring and controlling every aspect of your life. I have so much power over you already, no matter how much I try to conduct myself ethically, and I’m aware of it, I promise you, I think about it a lot of the time.”

That reassured Rey, that Hux was aware of how he could intimidate and scare her, that he was worried about it. It made him seem much less cold and a lot more - proper probably wasn’t the right word, but it was the closest one she had. “So how did it come up? Me, I mean,” Rey asked him.

Hux laughed a little at the memory and looked up from Rey’s face and into the distance, his gaze soft and unfocused. “Ren’d just come back from Bilbao this June, and Charles Saatchi had made an overture to him, wanted to buy one or two of his paintings. I remember your opinion of Saatchi, and mentioned it to him.”

Rey blinked. She found it difficult to believe that her wealthy, powerful patron had considered her opinions worth noting, let alone worth passing on to his brilliant artist lover. “He doesn’t think I’m wrong, does he?” she asked.

“No,” Hux shook his head, looked back down at her and squeezed down on her fingers again, “I believe his exact verbiage was ‘Charles Saatchi is a fucking pompous wife-beating asshole who thinks money can substitute for real erudition.’ And then he told me he was interested in painting your portrait. Not many twenty-year-olds have such strong opinions, or the innate wit and discernment to make them.” 

“Hm. I guess you’d know, being in your thirties and all that,” Rey teased a little, and Hux chuckled against her tender jibe, pointed ahead of him to a point across the glass doors. 

“Look. There he comes.” Hux’s index finger indicated a tall, bulky figure wrapped up in a knee length leather coat, and an enormous knit scarf. The thing looked as though it had been knit on needles as thick as broomsticks out of what looked like unspun roving, Icelandic lopi or something similar. Ren dragged a rolling suitcase behind him and held a pair of gift bags in his free hand, and his stride widened as he approached them. A large leather briefcase rocked against his left hip, its strap worn across his broad chest. Rey could not read his expression through the large pair of sunglasses he wore even at this late hour, and then he was out through the glass doors and standing in front of them. 

“‘Tage,” Ren said, his voice the same resonant baritone Rey remembered from the talk he had given. He let go of his suitcase handle and took his sunglasses off to reveal his face, bent to give Hux a brief, tender kiss. 

“Kylo,” Hux said after they had parted, leaned in for another kiss. “This is Rey,” Hux said afterwards. He placed a hand behind her shoulders, bracing her as she stepped forward towards Ren. 

Ren was taller than Rey had remembered him being, taller even than Hux, who stood over six feet tall on a good day. “Hello,” he said, softly, sincerely, held his right hand out to her. She put her own hand slowly in his, surprised at the way his fingers scaled to hers. Ren’s grip dwarfed hers, and he seemed to bend forever at the waist as he dipped his head towards the back of Rey’s hand, where he remained for a few seconds before he straightened back up. 

“You didn’t kiss my hand,” Rey said, surprised when Ren let go of her.

“I wouldn’t presume to,” he said, his grin sudden, crooked, mischievous. “I could if you’d like me to do so, though. We _have_ met, of course,” Ren added, “that lecture I gave at Goldsmiths about eight, nine weeks ago.”

 _He’s charming. Too charming,_ Rey thought, understood suddenly how Ren had melted through Hux’s hauteur and reserve. “You have a dangerous smile,” she said, glancing up to Hux, “doesn’t he, Armitage?”

“Oh, he does indeed,” Hux agreed with a wicked little grin, “and his tongue is even worse. Beware. He’s capable of banishing Saul’s demons without the aid of David’s harp. How was your flight, Kylo?” 

“Not bad,” shrugged Ren, “nobody in First Class recognized me so I left my earbuds in and napped until we approached Heathrow. The contemporary disregard for art literacy is a small blessing, sometimes.” 

“Shall we decamp?” Hux asked. He gave Rey his arm and waited for Ren to grab the handle of his suitcase, and they fell into step beside him. Rey appreciated how Ren shortened his stride for her benefit - many men didn’t really think of how easily they outpaced mixed company, but Ren moved like someone who had grown up with shorter people around him. A sister perhaps, or a mother, which was more likely. Rey had grown up with neither.

“How have you been?” Ren asked as they walked, “the two of you? Your back hasn’t been troubling you too much, has it, 'Tage?”

“No more than it usually has,” Hux said, and Rey found his arm curiously relaxed under her hand. There was something about Kylo Ren that put him at ease, soothed him. She thought back to the way Hux had jokingly warned her about Ren’s charms and grinned. 

“How about you, Rey?” Ren asked about her with the same casual ease he employed on Hux, an ease that left her feeling vaguely out of her depth. 

“Well -” she said, suddenly ill at ease, groping for words, “it’s the same, I think? I mean, you did a BFA too, you know the routine. Studio classes and crit sessions, life drawing.” 

“I do, yeah. And ‘Tage, he’s been taking good care of you, I hope.” Ren asked her with a brief wicked wink.

Rey caught the import of his question and felt herself blushing. _This is ridiculous,_ she told herself, _I’ve been fucking Armitage Hux for almost a year now, sex work is nothing to be ashamed of._ What she felt really wasn’t shame, and she knew it. It was more a vague self-consciousness at Ren talking to her as though she were his equal, as though she somehow held the same weight as he did in Armitage Hux’s affections. 

“Sorry,” Ren said, noticing her discomfort, “I’m not great at making conversation this side of a plane ride. Sleep dep, you know. Where are we going for dinner, ‘Tage?” 

“Bibendum, Chelsea.” Hux said, a certain dry amusement playing across his face in little flickers, rippling to vanish beneath his composure again. 

“Bibendum,” said Ren, thoughtfully, “that’s Claude Bosi’s place, isn’t it?” 

Hux granted Ren a brief smile, nodded. “Exactly. We ate there when they reopened this April, the week you took that paparazzo’s camera and hung it off a tree branch. You have a good memory.” 

“No, actually I wouldn’t have remembered the chef, but the in-flight magazine was raving about them,” Ren shrugged, winked. “Two Michelin stars, although I’m not so sure about the ‘My mum’s tripe and cuttlefish gratin’.” 

“Right,” Hux sighed, shaking his head briefly in mock disappointment, “I forget that your tastes run towards steak and chips no matter where we dine.” 

Ren laughed softly, indulgently. “The best way to test the back-of-house is to order something they can’t disguise with sauces or garnishes. Steak and fries is something they can’t possibly fuck up, and if they do then I’m pretty sure I don’t want to order the lobster, the sweetbreads or the monkfish either.”

Rey was learning to read the spaces between their words, the subtle heartbeat of their relationship, and she realized with a faint jolt that she had no reason to be insecure around Kylo Ren, that Hux sought and found different things in the both of them. Rey was someone Hux could express affection to without fearing rejection, and Ren was someone who could take his measure, spar him verbally for as long as they could both keep it up. She didn’t love Hux, not in a romantic sense, but he was very good to her and she was greatly fond of him. _I’m glad he has you,_ she thought with another glance to Ren, who caught her eye and nodded gently, as though he knew exactly what she was thinking. 

\--- 

“Tell me about the paparazzo incident,” Rey said as she explored her place setting, hesitating over the exquisite silverware before her. “The one Hux mentioned earlier, when we were still at the airport.” They were seated together at a table originally set for four, but the server had removed the extraneous chair, and now Rey sat to Hux’s left, the both of them facing Kylo Ren. This arrangement gave her enough space to dine without jabbing Hux with her elbow all the time; she was left-handed. 

“Oh, that,” Ren’s asymmetrical face crinkled with a grin as he tore a piece off a slice of bread, buttering it from a pat of butter he had left on the side of his bread plate. Hux had dubbed Ren “dreadfully American” and yet he ate with the level of formality expected of participants at state dinners, something Rey had only learned under Hux’s gentle tutelage. Ren glanced across the table at both Hux and Rey, his gaze flicking from one face to the other as he read the situation, and then he ate his piece of bread and nodded to himself. “I was seeing an actress late winter last year, early this year,” he said after he had consumed the morsel, “it wasn’t romantic or anything. I’m not exclusive, it’s just not the way I work, and I was clear about it when we started you know, hanging out and fucking.” 

“Right,” Rey said, remembered snatches of the coverage on the covers of tabloids like the Daily Mail. _TESSA SNAGS AMERICAN DREAM BOAT,_ things like that. The art press barely noticed or cared - Kylo Ren fucked people, the Pope was Catholic, the Queen was Anglican, and Boris Johnson was a twat.

“Well, she got upset that I wouldn’t actually stop seeing ‘Tage, and actually accosted him at a charity function in March and accused him of - of stealing me, as though - you know, I was property. She actually gave him a good shove, and with his back? That fall fucked his mobility up for the next two weeks.” 

That coincided with a period of time where Hux had cancelled four appointments with Rey, all in a row. She glanced to her side to see if Hux was bothered by the mention, but he only picked up his water glass and took a small sip, his green eyes alight with vicious amusement.

“She took a hiatus from the public eye forthwith,” Hux said, “because grabbing me by the lapels and attempting to drown me in the punch bowl is a grave _faux pas,_ no matter who I happen to sleep with.”

“I didn’t actually hear about your part in this,” Rey murmured to Hux, and he leaned briefly over to kiss her on the cheek, his lips still cold from the iced water. 

“No,” Hux said as he pulled his face away from hers, “that’s because I have solicitors, money, and acquaintances in interesting places. I prize my privacy.” 

The headlines had been terribly predictable: _KYLO CHEATED! Artist’s infidelity leads to high-stakes punch-out at charity ball!_ and _TESSA DEVASTATED BY: Kylo Ren Gay Scandal! Romps At Royal Ascot! Drugs and Orgies! Kinky Sex Shows!_ Rey had ignored them the same way she ignored anything the yellow press put out. She’d go out and check if the Daily Mail printed a headline saying the sky was blue and water was wet. 

The conversation slackened as a waiter brought their amuses. Rey found their presentations delightfully over-the-top - an olive-infused sauce encased in a crisp shell was served on a spoon balanced under a miniature olive tree, its trunk sticking out of a felt cover over a little plant pot. A tiny ice-cream cone turned out to be made of foie gras and salmon roe and spiced coconut cream was brought to the table in an empty eggshell sitting in an egg cup.  


Hux didn’t eat several of his amuses. He left his miniature ice-cream cone for Rey, let Ren finish his share of the chicken cracklings and ignored the coconut cream. In exchange Rey left him her asparagus and the crab under elderflower jelly. It was typical for Hux - he avoided overly rich foods and most meat, choosing to eat fish as his main animal protein, and he did not drink alcohol. It was easy to sum this behavior up as pickiness, but there was something disciplined about the way he did it that suggested it was not just a whim or just ethics. 

Ren picked up his story once the tiny, exquisite morsels had been vanquished and the plates cleared swiftly and efficiently. “The tabloid press was all over me, of course,” he said, as he buttered and dispatched more bread, “and I had assholes following me around for a little while. Nothing I couldn’t deal with, it’s not like I expect much privacy in my life, the way I work and practice art. But ‘Tage was finally feeling well enough to meet me for lunch, and one of those parasites pretty much jumps us and starts taking pictures after we leave the restaurant. It was a nice spring day, not very wet for a change, and I had a good lunch in me, I felt good, and I wasn’t going to put up with that bullshit anymore. I took his camera from him, led him on a chase through a park. When I had a good lead time on him I stopped, popped out his SD card, then I climbed up a big tree and hung the camera strap by the highest branch I could reach.” 

“I would offer Kylo my assistance with the press,” Hux added drily, “but he likes the controversy. It’s good for your work, isn’t it?” That last question was delivered with a slight stinging sarcasm, the verbal equivalent of a gentle poke in the gut.

“Kinda-sorta,” Ren shrugged, “it’s hard to explain.” Rey was starting to become used to Ren’s casual, easy vocabulary, his overt informality over perfect dining etiquette, but she was still a little surprised every time he obfuscated his wit behind a vapidity that reminded her of surfer-dude stereotypes. She could not imagine Kylo Ren, with his pallor and his skinny jeans, perched on top of a surfboard. He seemed rather more the kind of man who moshed for exercise and would start a fight club for fun. 

“Try me,” Rey said playfully, deadly serious under the play. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to be condescending or if this was just something he did in conversations, but she was fairly sure that her education had prepared her to understand the process behind Kylo Ren’s work, and how his demeanor and image fed into it. 

Ren straightened up in his chair, the relaxed façade dropping instantly from his face to reveal a bare intensity like electricity in his gaze. “You know my wallet name, of course. I don’t bother to hide it,” he said.

“Yes,” Rey said. In that moment she glimpsed something very intimate in his face, knew surely that this was how he looked when making love to someone he truly cared about. “You’re Benjamin Organa-Solo.”

“Yeah. Kylo Ren’s just the man I put on in reaction to shit going on in Ben Solo’s life. I mean look at it in a Kafkaesque sort of way - us humans, we’re not actually suited to living in cities, having all this artificial light around us, working emotionally stressful jobs. We’re just not neurologically wired for it. So it’s natural we’d all go a little insane - look at how many people are on psych meds, me included.” His words were careful, measured, and that thoughtfulness Rey had observed in his talk at her college returned, slowly possessing him, slowing the rhythms of his speech. She let him talk, increasingly fascinated.

“So Ren, Ren’s like the opposite and equal reaction to those forces. He is the part of me that won’t take it lying down, he’s the part of me that’d sooner roll around in filth and shame than be shamed by others. The part that isn’t quite civilized, who doesn’t care about polite fictions, who’ll put Christmas lights on the elephant in the room.”

“Like your series about sexual assault, uh, 2013, wasn’t it?” Rey asked, _“Shots From a Sandglass._ I haven’t actually seen in it person, but I’ve seen photos and digital slides of most of it.” _Shots_ had not been done as a traditional series of paintings and prints, had been presented as an installation instead. 

It consisted of hundreds of painstakingly done mixed media pieces, printed, drawn, collaged and in some cases, embroidered on sheets of exquisite translucent mulberry paper. Each sheet was sandwiched between clear acrylic boards and hung from the ceiling at various heights. The contents were disconnected diary entries detailing the horror, the pain and shame after a rape. An emergency room admission form. Toxicology test results. A prescription for antiretrovirals, a therapist’s intake form. Paperwork for a psychiatric 72-hour hold, HIV test results. The back side of each piece held a close-up, intimate life-size graphite sketch of a male body, parceled into individual shots. The crook of the arm with an IV cannula taped in place, bruised inner thighs, a sliver of face that was obviously Ren’s. The translucent paper allowed viewers to see both sides of the sheet at once, superimposing his personhood over all of that horrifying mundanity and vice versa. 

“That actually happened to me. To Ben Solo, I mean,” Ren said, and somehow Rey was not surprised. The installation had felt too raw and frantic to be a fabrication. “I got roofied at a gay bar in D.C in 2012, yeah, and I had to take the antiretrovirals, do all the blood tests, sit and sweat and wait and grieve, all that. I don’t think Ben could have dealt with it, but Kylo sure could, and his way of handling things he can’t understand or assimilate is to just chew it up and regurgitate it into a configuration that he prefers; paste it right behind his large plate-glass windows so it’s all the world, the press, the media, his voyeurs, it’s all they can see, you know, like that Radiohead song from _Amnesiac._ Life In A Glasshouse.” Ren was calm as he talked about his experience, solemn and serious, and Rey realized that Ben Solo the person had used Ren to process his pain, to understand it, embrace it and eventually accept it. It was something that happened to him. It was something that had affected him. But it was also the past, and not the totality of his life. He had found radical acceptance.

“What really struck me is how how gallery visitors were presented with a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels before they entered the installation,” Hux interjected, “and given a shot glass to drink it with as they exited. The shot glass was made from the joined bulbs of an hourglass, its bottom sealed off, and the top left open. I didn’t drink the whisky, of course, but anyone attempting to down the bourbon so would watch as it dripped through the neck of the hourglass, rendering at least half the shot inaccessible unless they were to turn the glass over, which would let the remainder trickle out and spill onto the floor.” There was a tremor in Hux’s reserve, a brightness to his cold green gaze that betrayed the emotions that Ren’s work had stirred in his soul.

"JD," Ren said, "because that was what I was drinking the night it happened. I still can't bear its taste." 

That struck Rey as an incredibly visceral, intimate way of conveying the etiolated days of recovery, the suspense, the anxiety and fear, and it left her trembling with sympathetic rage even at the distance and remove of four or five years, and the plush environment of a two-star London restaurant, and Hux took Rey’s hand, squeezed gently.

Ren paused and glanced at Rey, at the set of her face. “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, softly, “I should have checked with you if the topic was okay, I forget other people don’t have a fucking insane alter ego to help them deal.” An unexpected gentleness began to displace the swagger in Ren’s demeanor, and the change was swift, seamless, like a quick-change performer turning suddenly into someone else. 

“No, you’re not triggering me, I just - every once in a while I’m reminded of how much power and potential I hold as an artist. Thank you, Ren. It explains why you’re so much less of a wanker than I expected you to be,” Rey said in an attempt to lighten the mood. 

“In person?” Ren grinned again, relieved, but Rey did not let go of Hux’s hand. His fingers were warm and sound and reassuring. “Yeah. Like. Some people are like Fred Rogers. Y’know, Mr. Rogers, won’t you be my neighbor. What you see is what you get. You cut him down the middle, figuratively, and he’s Mr. Rogers all the way down. And he was good at it. He was sincere to the very bottom of his heart, and some people can do that. Others can’t.”

“Amen,” Hux said, and Rey felt the tension ease back out of his posture as he rocked minutely back in his chair. The waiter brought their starters then, and the conversation paused briefly as he laid the plates out. 

Ren only continued speaking after the waiter was again out of earshot. “If all you want to see in my work is Kylo Ren,” he said over his confection of scallops and strawberry sauce, “then that’s all you’re going to get out of it. That’s all you’re going to see, snark and commentary on the hell that is human life in the 21st century. But if you look beneath, and you can, maybe you can see Ben Solo hiding behind him, and that moment of connection, it’s better than sex. You know me intimately, just from that one jolting moment. Like, look at ‘Tage. He’s so proper on the outside, so cold, so stiff, even. But you and I, we both know an entirely different side of him, and the best part is it’s not the same side for either of us. You know a very different Armitage Hux from the one I know. And the guy underneath in his totality is just so much more than what you assume, it’s amazing, it’s like watching a single goddamn flower bloom and knowing that it is but one of the uncountable blossoms in the world. The rest is just medium and technique.” 

“You’re embarrassing me,” Hux laughed softly. He let go of Rey’s hand then, took a brief, tense breath and then let it out. Rey did not touch her crab with peaches, only watched their interplay, the way Ren would push Hux, but only enough to vex him lightly. 

“You’re not embarrassed ‘Tage,” Ren said with a wicked wink, “you just won’t accept compliments gracefully.” He paused to eat a morsel of scallop, and then looked up at Rey. “Oh shit. I just monopolized this conversation,” he said, “I’m sorry, Rey, I didn’t mean to talk over you.”

Rey laughed at how solicitous Ren was, how different he really was in private from the persona he wore professionally. “No, I was really interested in hearing about your process,” she said. “I had a hard time understanding how you could make yourself so vulnerable to the world, you know - so raw and naked, but now it’s starting to make sense to me.” 

“It’s easy to be naked if you’re wearing an invisible mask and tell yourself it’s there,” Hux said. He was also practiced in maintaining a public persona, in hiding his true feelings and vulnerability behind a façade, albeit one of hauteur rather than brashness. 

“Like the Emperor’s New Clothes in reverse.” Rey had glimpsed, on occasion, the complexity and intensity of his emotions in personal, private moments, and each incidence had been breathtaking, raw, nakedly human. She met Ren’s gaze across the table and saw the way he studied everything, those great dark eyes taking in every detail of his surroundings, realized that he felt it too. 

The conversation turned to more desultory matters as they finished their starters, and they had polished off their main courses when Ren spoke again. “So let’s hear about your artist’s manifesto, Rey,” he said. “What are you discovering for yourself when you make art? People don’t do uni-level academic art just because they want to. Folks who think it’s supposed to be fun all the time, they drop out or change majors. Each of us, you and I included, we do this because we hunger for it like the air we breathe. So what is it that drives you?” 

Rey paused and put her hands in her lap, took a deep breath and tried to formulate her answer in her head, and both Hux and Ren waited patiently for her to speak. “Okay,” she said after a few minutes of silence, “how much do you know about me, Ren?”

“Well,” Ren said, “you’re twenty, you’re a student at Goldsmiths. You’re intelligent, articulate, astute and very mature for your age. You’re quite beautiful too, if that matters to you. I noticed you’re a chronic note-taker, when I saw you at the talk I gave. Besides that, dribs and drabs. Little bits that ‘Tage mentions here and there, like your opinion on Charles Saatchi. Which I agree with, by the way.”

Rey took another steadying breath, glanced down at the ruins of her Cornish turbot in butter sauce. “My parents were both alcoholics and junkies,” she said, glad that her voice had stayed level as she spoke. “They tried to pimp me to a pedophile for drug money when I was four, but it turned out to be a police sting operation, and I wound up in care. Don’t get me wrong, it was still better than what would have happened if I’d stayed with them, but it’s hard to remember who you really are like that. I was in a group home, and then a foster home. Things didn’t work out there, so I went back to the group home, and then to a boarding school because I was a bit of a swot.”

Hux took her hand again, and she accepted the touch. She had never told him about the specifics of her past. He knew that she had no family or support network, because she told him so when he had asked her on their first meeting why she engaged in sex work, and these were all details he was learning anew.

“The only things I did that anyone seemed to care about were that I studied hard, and I drew. I started out drawing what I wanted my life to be like, like if I drew it enough, it would come true, or it would be a substitute for the parents I no longer have, a shoulder to cry on.” Rey said. She paused again, and saw that Ren was rapt, serious, that intense gaze focused wholly on her in that moment. “That’s not how the universe works, of course. So it started to become a sort of visual diary instead. If I drew it, because I saw it, then it’s real. It’s visible, it’s tangible, it’s something that happened and I don’t need to deny it.”  


Rey gave Hux’s hand another good squeeze, tried to articulate something she had never consciously laid out. “A lot of what I do revolves around my identity, I suppose. Who I am, because I don’t have that figured out yet. You pour a liquid into a glass, and it takes the shape of its container. That’s what I do on reflex, because I don’t know how to be otherwise. It’s safer. It’s what people like and want. Well, sometimes I want to take that glass of liquid and pour it out on a page, and see where it runs and where the blot ends. I define myself every time I draw something, I reinstate my outline and my boundaries, I mark the world, I convince myself I exist.” 

“And you’ll do anything,” Ren said softly, very gently, “have done that, in fact, to make sure you can continue telling the world you’re here, you’re real, and you’re not going away. That’s power. I admire you.” 

“You - you can’t admire me,” Rey said, fighting the sudden urge to cry. Her nose prickled sharply against the emotions she so rarely indulged, and she couldn’t believe that she was hearing one of her artistic heroes express his admiration of her ramblings. “ You’ve probably heard this pretentious stuff from every undergrad you’ve ever spoken to.” 

“Okay, Rey,” Ren said, using her name to reassure her, “Everyone’s reasons for making art is different. Every different reason is valid. Even if you just want to make something pretty, it’s something you want and in making art you exert your will upon the world. ‘Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ So it sounds pretentious. So do I. But is that really us being pretentious, or contemporary society valuing the idea of uneducated ‘straight talk’ over erudition and the quest for understanding?” 

Rey remained silent, and Hux picked Ren’s question up in her lapse. “There aren’t any simple solutions, you can’t just say ‘if we leave the EU then the discontent of our generation will be resolved’, because it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about people wishing for a Britain that never was,” he said. 

“Exactly.” Ren flashed a crooked grin in Hux’s direction, approval and something like pride flashing across his face. “That you’re starting to find more complicated answers behind the things you’re searching for,” he said, turning back to Rey, “you’re already way ahead of most people ever will be in their lives. I judge people by their implementation mostly, by the content of their work, not why they do it. And I do admire you for your drive and hunger. Sure, people are buying my artwork for five, six figures a pop, but I’ve been doing this for twenty years. I come from a place of privilege. I’m white, I’m a dude, my parents are well-off. I got to go to RISD and I did my MFA at Yale. I never had to worry about something like how to pay for tuition, what I was going to do with my student loans afterwards. I’ve never had to face the decisions you have, I’ve never ever had to consider how to make ends meet when my work didn’t sell. You, Rey, you’re not just working against your curriculum, your relative naiveté art-wise, the gap between what you do and who you want to be. You’ve had the deck stacked against you from the start. And you go on nevertheless.” 

“Sometimes I feel as though -” Rey started to say slowly, “I feel as though I’m making art even if all I’m doing is getting out of bed and pulling myself together for the day. You’re a process artist, Kylo, so you understand - I guess the work is the end product of each and every time I stare at the ceiling in the morning and decide to continue.” 

“Exactly. There are some days when having a cold bowl of cereal and taking a shower are triumphs, not just routine.” What Kylo Ren had just said was incredibly affirming, encouraging, and it cheered Rey up immensely to realize that even he felt moments of doubt, had trouble pulling himself out of bed on bad days.

\---

Hux dropped Rey off near her flat after dinner, with Kylo Ren dozing on and off in the back seat. His dinner, cheese plate, dessert and the aperitifs he had consumed had worked their effect on him, and he did not get out of the car when Hux parked to let her out. 

Rey unbuckled her seat belt and stepped onto the pavement, blinked with surprise as Hux killed the engine and got out of the car as well. “I’ll walk you upstairs,” he said, “Kylo can fend for himself, I assure you.” 

She took his proffered hand and they walked slowly like courting lovers away from the car. “I wish you had told me about your parents,” Hux said very softly, in a voice meant for her alone. 

“Why?” Rey asked him, read sorrow in his gaze, in the way he turned away from her eyes whenever she looked. _He’s trying to keep his composure._

They paused right at the door of Rey’s flat, and she waited for Hux to continue. “If seeing me, if - if having to sleep with me reminds you too much of what they tried to do, I want to know, Rey. I will regret no longer having you in my life, but -” He paused then, hesitated. “I pay for access to your body. Your heart and mind are yours alone, and my desire for you does not ever outweigh your comfort or happiness.” 

“No,” Rey said, sniffling a little as the import of his words struck her. “No, I’d much rather continue seeing you, even if I know you’re good for the promise you made me, that you will pay for my education. I like talking to you, Armitage. I like to learn things from you. And you’re my friend. A good friend.” A fat tear rolled down her cheek, and he pulled a clean linen handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it into her hand. 

“Besides,” she continued after she had dabbed her tears away, “I don’t think there’s even one young man in London around my age who is as good a shag as you are, and I’m not currently interested in teaching anyone how to fuck.”

Hux let out a long slow sigh, smiled just a little. “Every time I forget how wicked you are, Rey, you swiftly remind me of my foolishness with your razored tongue. Yes. I don’t want to hurt you, but I trust your decisions and your agency.” He paused and leant stiffly to kiss her, and she tipped her face up to accept it, savored the heat and softness of his mouth against hers. “If you need anything more from me, you have but to ask.” 

“Yes,” Rey said. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him again, reached into her handbag for her keys. “Yes, I will.” 

“Goodnight, Rey,” Hux said. He took her hand briefly, squeezed it gently, then let go. “I will see you next Friday.” 

“Goodnight,” she said, and Hux turned swiftly away from her to descend the stairs back down to the street, to find his car and his sleeping boyfriend.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey spends a morning sitting for her portrait at Kylo Ren's studio before she has one of her appointments with Armitage Hux, and she is therefore with him when he receives tragic news. 
> 
> \---
> 
> content warning: discussion of sexual assault  
> content warning: discussion of rape culture  
> content warning: discussion of tentacle porn, if it bothers you  
> content warning: a major character deals with ongoing chronic pain  
> content warning: nonspecific discussion of a character getting severely injured in a serious accident

Rey’s Saturday began with the screech of her alarm clock, and she attempted to roll over and cover her ear with a pillow, but the bloody thing was across the room, and she had bought it specifically for its incredibly irritating alarm sound. That had the effect of forcing her out of bed to turn it off, which meant that her chances of curling back up and falling asleep again were greatly diminished. She didn’t normally have trouble getting out of bed most of the year, but the shortened days of winter stirred some primal urge to hibernate, which she didn’t have the time to do until the end of the autumn term next month. 

Rey turned off her alarm clock and turned to her wardrobe to choose her clothing for the day. She had postponed yesterday’s Friday appointment with Armitage Hux due to a surprise assignment. She had rescheduled instead for Saturday, today, but she was also going to visit Kylo Ren at his personal studio space. Rey turned away from her wardrobe and twitched one of the drawn curtains aside, glanced out into the gloom of an early November morning. 

Best to be prepared for miserable weather - this was England, after all. Rey considered her many options. Hux did not require her to dress with elaboration or formality in their little meetings, but she liked to do so in any event, partly because she knew his tastes and preferences, and also because it made her feel sexier, more a woman and less an overgrown child pantomiming what she saw in Mills and Boon novels. 

Rey’s dysfunctional childhood and institutional upbringing had left her at once starving for affection and terrified of it. She had wanted to be loved, dreamed of being spoiled and pampered and indulged, but was also deeply suspicious of such gestures - always wondering if there was a hidden ulterior motive. She had turned to escort work out of financial desperation, but found an ease in her arrangement with Hux that she had not anticipated at all. The transactional nature of their relationship made it incredibly easy for her to accept his affections, knowing exactly what he wanted out of her, when, and why. 

She suspected, was almost sure that was why he had hired her instead of courting some woman in his extravagant manner. Surely anyone would swoon over a handsome, still young-ish millionaire presenting them with jewels, delicate, luxurious lingerie and designer attire. But he did not do so, and Rey reaped the benefits instead. She settled eventually on a frothy, lacy bralette and boyshort set worn under fleece-lined thermal leggings and an unstructured, long-tailed shirt. She would wear a long cardigan against the cold, and swathe herself in a chunky infinity cowl.

Rey grabbed most of her selections by their hangers, her underclothes tucked over her arm, and came out of the bedroom in her pyjamas. Nobody else was awake, her flatmates were both still asleep, and Rey tiptoed quietly to the shared bathroom, shut and locked the door behind her. She hung the hangers up from the hook on her side of the bathroom door, laid her underthings on the bathroom counter. She used the toilet, flushed, and then grabbed at her toothbrush and toothpaste, began readying herself for the long day she had ahead.

\---

The Tico sisters had woken up by the time Rey was done making herself presentable, and she emerged from the bathroom to the strains of French pop music, courtesy of Rose Tico’s phone, currently plugged into a pair of speakers on the kitchen counter. A wonderful aroma hung in the air, salty, smoky bacon and sizzling fat and sweet brown smell of toasting bread.

“Morning, Rey,” Rose said, “I’m making some breakfast for us. Would you like me to put some on for you, too? Bacon, scrambled eggs, baked beans on toast with Marmite.” 

“That sounds wonderful, yes,” Rey said. “I’d love some. Do you need any help?” Rose was cheerful, round-faced and of Vietnamese descent. She was one of the sweetest individuals Rey had ever had the honor of knowing. They had wound up in the same foster family for nearly a year when they were both seventeen, and become quite close as a result. Rose had been separated from her sister several years prior due to Paige aging out of care, and Rey had in a sense become a surrogate for Paige in between her infrequent visits.

“You could help me with the toast and open the tins,” Rose suggested, “I’ve got the frying pan under control. I’d ask Paige, but she’s in the loo.” Paige Tico was a contrast to her short, curvy sister. She was tallish and slender instead, stubbornly androgynous, which made all kinds of sense considering her profession. Paige was a civilian pilot working directly for a corporate employer, and aviation was rife with sexism. She dealt with the sexism the way a lot of other women did - by passing as “one of the boys” while at work. 

“It’s not a problem.” Rey was not a good cook, but she could manage simple things like toast, fried eggs, and the occasional chicken breast for a salad. It was fortunate then that Paige Tico was a fantastic cook if she put her mind to it - she had been old enough to remember all the family recipes when she and Rose had lost their parents. She cooked on off-days, and when she wasn’t actively on call as a corporate pilot, and Rose took over when she was busy flying rich businessmen to Switzerland for ski holidays. 

Rey took three plates from one of the cabinets, left them stacked on top of each other when she laid them on the counter. She then pulled two warm slices of toast out of the toaster and put two more slices of bread in, began spreading the toast thinly with Marmite, as Rose preferred it. She emptied a tin of baked beans into a bowl, bunged the lot in the microwave and then heated the beans for 45 seconds. 

Paige Tico came out of the bedroom she shared with her sister just as Rose put the first loaded plate on the table. Two rashers of back bacon and a fluffy helping of scrambled eggs topped with chives, and two slices of toast spread with Marmite. The baked beans remained in their bowl - Rey didn’t like putting them on her toast until she was just about to eat them, it got too soggy for her tastes otherwise. 

“You’re dressed to go out,” Rose said to Rey as they sat at the dining table, “are you going to see, you know, _him?”_  The Tico sisters knew of Rey’s arrangement with Armitage Hux, and Rey would not have gotten as far in her research on Hux if Paige had not aided her. Neither she nor Rose judged Rey for her sex work, but they both insisted she check in with them after appointments to make sure she was well. 

“No, not Hux right this moment,” Rey said, after she had finished chewing and swallowing a bite of scrambled eggs. “I’m going to see an artist for some modeling work.” She considered mentioning Kylo Ren, but neither Paige nor Rose had a deep interest in academic art, and they probably would not recognize the name. 

“Naked modeling?” Rose asked, aware of Rey’s sideline as an occasional art model. She did it mostly for universities, and only when the schedules did not conflict with the classes she had to attend, but it was pleasant work with professional artists and respectful students. Her major concern during life drawing sessions was whether the heating was adequate. 

Rey shrugged. “I don’t know yet, but he’s a well-known professional, and I haven’t heard any rumors about him being a creep. He has a reputation for being a bit of an egotistical arse, but that’s mostly a public persona he wears.” 

“I’m on call today, which means I might be in another country by lunchtime,” Paige said over a slice of toast, “so you’ll check in with Rose, yes?” Paige always preferred her baked beans separate from her toast. 

“He’s got a boyfriend,” Rey said, knowing full well that Kylo Ren was pansexual. She just wanted to reassure Paige, who had quasi-adopted Rey when they had moved in together, and prone to worry due to frequent separations from Rose, her younger sister and self-assumed responsibility.

“Check in anyway,” Paige insisted, “I don’t like wondering if you’re floating in the Thames or buried in a shallow grave.”

“Of course.” Rey trusted Ren not to hurt her, realized that she had felt so since last week. The pain and shame radiating off _Shots from a Sandglass_ had been so authentic, so raw that she could not imagine him subjecting another person to it. His quiet admission that he could no longer drink Jack Daniels only reinforced her sense of certainty about him.

\---

Kylo Ren had a drawing studio in Bexley, in a converted warehouse space in Erith. He lived and worked there whenever he was in London, which was almost half the calendar year. Rey wasn’t sure what to expect from his workspace - the warehouse building itself felt uncomfortably gentrified, with its vehicle access barriers and CCTV security. Rey followed the directions he had scrawled for her at the restaurant last Friday, on a scrap of notebook paper - he had even drawn her a convenient little map that scaled surprisingly well, and found herself at the door of a studio flat on the top floor of the converted warehouse building. 

She could hear music faintly on the other side of the door, but it wasn’t quite loud enough for her to be able to tell what it was, and she laid her hand on it for a moment, read its vibrations before she stepped back and pressed on the doorbell once, twice. 

The music stopped, and there was a muffled “Just a minute!” from the other side. The thump of footfalls followed, far apart at the ends of long strides, and then the doorknob rattled before the door opened and swung inwards. Ren seemed taller, broader when framed by the doorway, and he flashed a lopsided grin at Rey as he stepped back to admit her. “Heya,” he said without further preamble, “uh, make yourself comfortable.” He waved to a beaten-up, slightly ragged armchair placed up against one of the walls. 

“Hi,” Rey said, and she stepped in, let Ren shut the door behind her before she sat down in the armchair. There was very little furniture in the estimated 500 square feet of the studio’s main space - a broad flat plinth turned on its side and propped against a wall, a large taboret beside a hard-looking plastic chair. There were two large easels in the middle of the room, and the kitchenette space was flanked by a full-sized refrigerator. A large tarpaulin lay unfolded atop the floor, honey-brown hardwood contrasting on the edges of blue plastic. 

A small staircase led upstairs to a railed-off mezzanine where Ren presumably slept, and there were two other doors - one unmarked and opening into the kitchenette, presumably a bathroom, from the full clothes rack right beside it. The other had a piece of paper taped to it at eye-height, and the writing on the paper read DARK ROOM. DO NOT OPEN OR ENTER WITHOUT PERMISSION. Several portable lights were crammed in the space under the stairs, their power cords all neatly looped and secured with pieces of string. 

The armchair was surprisingly comfortable despite its age and decrepitude, and Rey paused to glance at the drawings pinned all over the free wall space of the studio - charcoal and ink studies, loose graphite sketches, all of them held to the wall with brass thumb tacks that gleamed dull and golden against creamy deckle-edged paper. Rey thought about the mulberry paper in his installation, this heavy hand-molded French printmaking paper for sketch work. She sensed that Ren was closely attuned to the materiality of his chosen media, that its responses to the physical stresses of drawing were every bit as important as its archival qualities.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Ren asked her as he crossed the floor to the kitchen space, edged around the taboret, “Coffee, tea? I have lemonade in the fridge if that’s more your speed, and I mean the fizzy English kind. It’s what I drink if I want a beer when I’m working.” He wore faded paint-streaked blue jeans and a white chef’s jacket repurposed as an artist’s smock.

“A cup of tea, please,” Rey said, and Ren took a kettle from the miniscule under-counter cabinet, filled it, and put it on the range to boil. The entire place smelled like linseed oil and thinner, a scent that Rey associated with comfort and safety, and she felt herself relaxing into the comfortable, slightly overstuffed armchair.

Ren pulled the hard plastic chair up, facing away from the armchair, and he sat in it crosswise, his forearms resting on the backrest. “Thanks for coming to see me today,” he said with another one of those maddening grins, “I know you’re really busy, especially this late in the academic term.” 

“It isn’t every day I have an artist of your weight class asking to paint my portrait,” Rey said, glancing around the studio flat. She wondered how much Ren was paying in rent, wondered if she could find herself a place like this too. It would be very nice to be able to leave her art up on the walls, on easels, in any stage of completion. 

Ren nodded, businesslike, and pushed his hair out of his eyes one-handed. “I suppose you’ve modeled before, for life drawing and the like?”

“I have, yes,” Rey said, “and I still do it from time to time if the hours don’t conflict with my classes or my studio time.”

“Right, so you know what to do, and I won’t have to repeat it. I kinda like to get everything out on the table at the start so you know what I expect from you as a model, and that way we aren’t wasting each other’s time if we can’t agree. So let’s start.” Ren was serious now, thoughtfulness and intensity suffusing his expressive face. “Since you’re not commissioning me for your portrait you fall into model territory, which means I’ll pay you for your time. My rate is twenty to fifty pounds an hour depending, because most of the people I draw and paint need the money, and it’s not as though I can’t afford it anyway. I pay nude models more because, well, you’re going to have to pose naked on a splintery plinth in a drafty room, that’s hardly great working conditions.”

None of that was outside of Rey’s experiences. Ren’s rates were higher than typical, but it made sense considering his wealth and reputation. “That sounds like what I already know to expect.”

Ren nodded briefly. “You already know I’m kind of a chatty bitch,” he said. “Sometimes I yammer at my models about every topic under the sun, whatever crosses my mind like a less coherent James Joyce. Other times, if I’m hyperfocusing, I’ll be awkwardly silent, and you’ll have to entertain yourself mentally drawing a dick on my forehead or whatever else you do to not die of boredom.”

Rey burst out laughing, and Ren grinned again at her, winked. 

“ I can’t predict when I’m going to be talkative or silent,” he said, “so you’ll have to be prepared for either. I won’t mind you chatting back, I have some of the coolest conversations that way. Also, I don’t fuck my models, no matter how beautiful they are. It isn’t professional. You’re already making yourself vulnerable enough coming into my space and taking your clothes off so I can draw you exposed as you are. If you want to ride the Ren train you’ll have to wait until I either complete or abandon the project, depending.”

Rey blinked in amusement and horror alike, started to giggle as her brain seized desperately at humor in an act of self-defense. “Is that what you call it? The Ren train?” she asked him.

“My cock, you mean?” Ren chuckled softly. It was a deep sound that came from the depths of his chest, as rich and warm as his voice. 

“Yeah,” Rey said, hoping that it was not the case. She wouldn’t be able to keep her composure long enough to sit for any kind of portrait if she had to think of the “Ren train”, not with the image of Thomas the Tank Engine hanging limply off Ren’s mons pubis, building a head of steam as he/it grew more turgid.

“Fuck, no,” Ren said, and then he had to stop as he was laughing too hard to talk. “No,” he said at last, straightening slowly up in his chair, “I’m just trying to lighten the mood. Habit. Like I said, models, women especially, have to step onto uncertain ground to model for me. They don’t know me personally, they don’t know what to expect, and since they’re modeling for me alone, who the hell is going to be around to help if I assault them? They don’t know if I’m safe or not, so - it’s the Schrödinger’s Rapist thing.” 

It impressed Rey that Kylo Ren thought about all those things - it wasn’t that she didn’t expect men to be decent human beings, they were perfectly capable of it, but most of them could afford to ignore things that women had to worry about, and did. “Can I ask a personal question?” she asked him.

“Ask away,” Ren said easily.

Rey tried to formulate her question tactfully. “Did you know all this already,” she asked, “or was it - was it what happened in 2012 that made you think about how you come across to women?” She wasn’t sure how directly she wanted discuss Ren’s sexual assault, if only because his art had let her vicariously experience what he had gone through, and it raised goosebumps on her skin to think too much about it. 

“The rape, you mean. No.” Ren shook his head, smiled just a little. His eyes were briefly hidden behind long eyelashes as he gave himself over to a pleasant memory. “My mom is super-feminist in a good way,” he said after a few moments of reverie, “she brought me up alone, you know, when my dad decided to run away from being a responsible human being. She’s not an art person, but she told me I could be as much of an an asshole as I wanted, flip Congress off for all she cared, as long as I was equal-opportunity about the misanthropy.” 

Rey blinked again in surprise. The idea of others having parents was largely an abstract assumption, and it jolted her a little to be reminded that other people’s parents loved them and could be positive influences. Besides, she could not imagine Kylo Ren (the persona) listening to his hypothetical parents, not unless he had their ashes pressed into vinyl records and then put them on a turntable. “You really aren’t like the image you project in public.” 

“That macho thing?” Ren shrugged easily. “As Ben I’m pretty fond of my body. I’m cisgender, I’ve always been comfortable in my physicality. I like being tall and buff, it lets me do some things I wouldn’t be able to do if I were like five feet six and a hundred forty pounds. I used to free-climb. I still like to run every day, do weights sometimes. As for the overweening asshole part, that’s a way of dealing, I guess. I had what you call a difficult childhood. I was not being abused, I was just a really angry kid. Was in therapy a lot, got into fights. I was losing control of myself in grad school. So I created this other guy, Kylo Ren, so that I could express and let it out, not hurt the people Ben Solo loves. I keep a tight leash on Ren, partly because he isn’t really me, and partly because I don’t want that to be the real me.”

That felt oddly logical. Ben Solo _was_ disciplined, as far as Rey could tell, and there was a part of Kylo Ren’s bitter misanthropy that reeked of post-traumatic stress, of fear taken so far that it could only be expressed in anger and shame. 

“So,” Rey asked, “would you prefer me to call you Kylo Ren, or Ben Solo?” 

“Kylo or Ren is fine,” he said, “whenever someone uses my wallet name I expect my mom to be dragging me from the room by my ear afterwards.”  

Rey giggled again, if only at the visual of an adult Kylo Ren bent at the waist, protesting as his mother grabbed him by the ear after a gallery showing. 

“Ok, back to the shop talk,” Ren said patiently after Rey had finally managed to recover her composure. “I work with music on, and it might not be music that you like. I had to put this bit in after one of my models put her clothes back on and walked out on me in the middle of a sitting because we got into an argument about my fondness for the Manic Street Preachers, and frankly, I have no interest in drawing or painting someone who has such shitty taste, anyway.” 

\---

Ren had Rey sit for a series of sketches, reference studies, and warmups, employing inks, charcoal, and graphite on big sheets of creamy Rives BFK paper taped to a Masonite board. She sat dressed in the scruffy armchair, her cowl and cardigan in her lap and her shirt collar open so he could draw her neck. “Is this your usual process when you do portraits?” she asked him from across the studio, her cup of tea placed neatly on the floor. Ren had given her a small silicone lid to put over it when she wasn’t drinking it, and the droll face of a little pink pig looked up at her every time she glanced down at it.

“Yeah,” he said, just a bit absently, “I’ve turned down more portrait commissions than anything else.” Ren had put on a Spotify playlist consisting mostly of synthpop and Krautrock and left the volume on low so they could converse. 

_How does it feel to treat me like you do? When you’ve laid your hands upon me and told me who you are?_ Bernard Sumner sang.

“This doesn’t shock me somehow,” Rey said. “Most people don’t really understand what’s involved in sitting for a portrait, timewise. I tried to draw my roommate once, for a school assignment, and she just didn’t like the idea of sitting there for several sessions over multiple days.” She had resorted eventually to asking Hux if he would sit, and he had gamely done so after growing several days of stubble to soften his jawline and obscure his identity somewhat. There were other personal and erotic studies of him in her sketchbook, but she had carefully avoided filling in his facial features and scars so he would remain anonymous. 

“Yeah,” Ren nodded once, and then muttered softly as his stick of vine charcoal snapped in half with a ping and a screech.  “Fuck. Sorry,” he said, shuddering briefly at the noise before he continued. “The people who want to commission me are all rich as fuck, which means they want something that makes them look better. I’m not in the business of making people look better. I’m in the business of making people _look.”_ It was a simple, elegant way of describing modern art, of the shift away from pure representation since the advent of cameras.

“They’d get more out of a stylist and photographer in that case,” Rey agreed, waited for Ren to reply. He did not, and for a few minutes she thought he had slipped into hyperfocus, like he had warned her about. She couldn’t see much of his face from where she sat - the easel and Masonite board were in the way, but she watched him shift his weight easily from foot to foot, appreciated the way his thighs filled his jeans. 

The Eurythmics were playing by the time Ren spoke up again. “You know who’s a surprisingly good model? ‘Tage. He’s probably the stillest person I’ve ever seen.” 

_Sweet dreams are made of these, who am I to disagree?_

“He is. You’ve drawn him too?” Rey asked, and then she bit down on her lip when she realized what she had just let slip. She thought of Hux sitting in his favorite armchair one late afternoon as she stripped articles of her clothing off to tease him, how motionless he had been despite the avid desire in his gaze.

“Personal stuff only,” Ren shrugged. He put the vine charcoal down on his taboret and picked up a stick of compressed charcoal instead. “He doesn’t want a full portrait. You brought your sketchbook today, right? Show me yours and I’ll show you mine? I promise there’s embarrassing stuff in it; I got double dog-dared to draw tentacle porn while I was drinking with friends in Helsinki.” 

“That just means you’re in good company,” Rey said, amused. “Hokusai did tentacle porn and you don’t see anyone laughing at him.” 

“Hm.” Ren put the compressed charcoal down on the lip of his easel, rolled his shoulders. “I think we should both take a break,” he said, stepping out from behind the easel, “I’ve been drawing you for over an hour.” 

“Thanks.” Rey stood up and stretched, worked her neck in a slow arc along her shoulders to loosen up, while Ren headed to the sink to wash the charcoal off his hands. 

“You want a fresh cup of tea?” he asked, his back turned to her as he scrubbed at his nails with a brush, “that one’s probably gone cold, and I’m going to grab a snack, otherwise I’ll forget to and just draw and paint until I collapse.” 

Ren walked up to the easel Ren had set up, stepped around it to glance at his drawings. Her likeness stared out from the paper, its fibers worked so hard and so repeatedly under Ren’s charcoals that it had developed a velvety nap that caught and trapped pigment. He had drawn her face and neck in exquisite detail, leaving the space past the collar of her shirt and her hairline blocked in but undefined, and that one large drawing was surrounded by a number of smaller studies - a rough sketch in technical pen, a few detailed in pencil, an actual bust sketched entirely in straight lines intersecting to suggest planes and curves. 

These were all techniques she had learned in her classes, but Ren had done them all so quickly, without second-guessing himself. It was the kind of confidence that came from hours of practice every day, and that could only really happen with some measure of financial independence, or a wealthy patron. “I’ll take a lemonade instead,” Rey said belatedly, still looking at his draftsmanship.

“Sure,” he said. He retrieved a single-serving cup of fruit and yogurt from the refrigerator, offered it wordlessly to her. 

She crossed to the kitchen space and took it from his hand, accepted the spoon he dug out of his silverware drawer, and then padded back across the room to her chair to retrieve her sketchbook, and phone from her satchel. Two text messages blinked up on her lock screen, both having been sent in the last ten minutes. 

_Rey,_ the first one read, _Paige got called in to work to fly someone to Zurich, so it’ll be just us for dinner, unless you have other plans. Ideas?_

The second was from Hux. _Dear Rey. I understand you’re presently at Kylo’s studio in Erith. Please ask him to turn his bloody phone on, thank you. PS: Would you also kindly ask him if he’s interested in a late lunch with us when I come to pick you up? I have to arrange things like this or he’ll forget to eat while he’s working._

Rey replied to Rose’s text message first. _I’ll be having dinner with Hux today, so feel free to have whatever you like. Would you like me to bring something back for you? I’m sure he would drive me on the errand even if it’s out of our way._

That done, she put her phone down in her lap and peeled the foil off the yogurt cup, stirred it up with her spoon until the fruit on its bottom was distributed evenly through it. “Armitage would like you to turn your phone on,” she said, “and he’s also asked me if you’d like to have a late lunch with us, when he comes to pick me up.” 

“Aw, fuck,” Ren said, “I always forget to put it on the charger before I fall into bed, it’s probably flat now.” He had loaded a large plate with table grapes, pre-cut slices of cheese, crackers, and salumi, and brought it over to his taboret, which he wheeled closer to Rey’s chair. He left to retrieve his uneaten cup of yoghurt, and brought two glass bottles of lemonade with him. Lastly, he pulled his chair up closer to Rey’s, so they could eat together. “I’ll stick it back on the charger after we eat, so could you please tell ‘Tage I flaked again?” 

Rey smiled, turned the phone camera on Ren in a wild burst of inspiration, and he gamely held his bottle of lemonade up for the photograph, which she sent to Hux with her reply. “What about the late lunch?” 

“Probably not today,” he said as he twisted the cap off the glass bottle. “I’ve got a dinner date with some other friends of mine, I’d be too full to eat if I had a late lunch, but if he just wants me to hang out I’ll come along. Unless you think I’ll be in the way.”

Rey laughed, shook her head. “What, in a threesome? I don’t think your prick is quite that big.” 

Ren doubled over in his chair, nearly dropped his lemonade on the floor. “There is nothing I can say or do in reply to that that won’t sound creepy, so I won’t, but God, there’s a lot of fire in you, isn’t there?” 

“Armitage says he likes it that way,” Rey said as she formulated her answer to Hux’s earlier question. “I keep him on his toes.” 

“Yeah,” Ren nodded easily. “He’s always been the kind of man you catch with vinegar, not honey. He really doesn’t like sycophants, I think he doesn’t trust anyone that’s too overtly nice, not that I can blame him.”

“How do you know him? I mean, how did you meet?” Rey asked, curious as she opened her own bottle of lemonade with a hiss of escaping gas. 

“This goes back about … 23 years ago, actually,” Ren said, his eyes growing distant and pensive again. “My mother had an invite to a dinner party in Boston, something or other happened, she couldn’t arrange a babysitter or nanny for me on time. So she scrubbed me, dressed me in my best clothes, and took me along. I was eight years old, by the way. Now, you’d think of a formal dinner as something awful to take a child to - and it would have been, but she made arrangements with her hosts, and I was seated in the drawing-room and given a more casual plating of everything being served in the dining hall. The caterers, the butler, and the hired waiters were all super-nice, and she would slip out between courses to check on me. There was another kid there, older than me. Red hair.” 

“Was that Armitage?” Rey asked, wondering how Hux had looked as a child. Thin, she thought, reflecting his ectomorphic build, but sound and well-knit nevertheless, like his adult self. The red hair must have been even lighter in his childhood, strawberry blond, perhaps.

Ren picked a slice of sopressata up and ate it, nodded. “Yeah, yeah it was,” he said after he swallowed. “He looked miserable and also like he wanted to talk to me, but didn’t dare to, which meant, of course, that I had to. So I told him ‘Hello, my name is Ben. Who are you?’ And he just went so still and red that I realized I’d said something wrong, and he finally just drew himself up with all the pride he could muster and told me his name was Armitage Hux. ‘Did your mom bring you along?’ I asked him, ‘mine did.’ And he told me he didn’t have a mum, just stepmothers, and his dad had just divorced number two. The good thing about being eight years old is that you don’t really care about shit like that. So I asked him what school was like in England, what he liked to do, things like that.”

“And he opened up to you?” Brendol Hux’s string of trophy wives was not broadly publicized, but it was still a matter of public record, and Armitage Hux had grown up with four mothers, sequentially. There was also a tiny whisper that he had not been born to Brendol’s first wife, Maratelle, but was the result of an affair. Rey had paid those little mind when she did her research - she wanted to know what he was like, not who he inherited his chromosomes from.

Ren ate more sopressata, followed it with crackers and cheese while he formulated his answer. “A little bit,” he said, “‘Tage was every bit as quiet as he is now, I think it’s a personality thing, that and a four-year age gap is a lot when you’re eight years old. He was twelve, and very intelligent, and he probably found it tiresome to talk to me, precocious as I was. His manners were too good for him to show it, though, and eventually we wound up sitting side by side while I showed him Super Mario Land 3 on my Game Boy. His dad had never let him have anything like that, so I let him play. So there we are, off in our own little world for most of the evening. His dad’s happy to ignore him as long as he’s not wandering around lost, and my mom always encouraged me to make friends.” Rey worked her way slowly through the cup of yogurt as Ren spoke slowly, the music in the background all but forgotten in their conversation.

“That’s … that’s surprisingly sweet.” Rey said. She imagined the both of them sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at some exotic hardwood table, whispering to each other while the adults drank their coffees and networked around them. Ren must have been a tall boy for his age, she thought, a narrow face, those dark eyes larger in proportion, and that mop of wavy hair trimmed shorter.

“Well, it doesn’t end that way,” Ren said, his expression at once amused and rueful. “His dad had a few too many postprandial drinks and grabbed my mom somewhere personal. So she punched him out, her in her evening dress and all. It must have hurt, she was wearing a big antique ring my grandma - her adoptive mom - had given her. I never got to see ‘Tage again, not for over a decade.” 

“Um. Wow.” Rey did not know what Ren’s mother looked like, but she had seen photographs of Brendol Hux, and he had been a tall, broad man with brawler’s fists and a gut straining against the top button of his suit coat. She wondered how much force Ren’s mother had put in that punch to floor him.

Rey had reached the bottom of her yogurt cup by then, and she plucked herself some grapes from the bunch as Ren ate some more. Crackers and cheese, mostly, a translucent leaf of prosciutto, a morsel of capicola followed by a sip from the bottle of lemonade.

“So fast-forward to 2013. I was at the London show for _Shots from a Sandglass_ at Gagosian, the one at Davies Street, and I actually had to put content warning posters at the entrance to the gallery because people were coming out distraught. Which I personally think is a good thing, in some senses, because it forces people to think about rape culture, but I wasn’t interested in hurting anyone who had a similar experience to mine,” Ren’s gaze was veiled again, shadowed with painful memories, but he seemed to shrug the thoughts off as one might drop a cloak to the ground.  “I’m standing there feeling guilty,” he continued, “watching people drink all that Jack Daniels out of those hourglass shot glasses and sure that I had made a terrible mistake, and I wind up having an anxiety attack then and there. And there this tall red-headed man cuts in and takes me gently by the arm, walks me to the men’s room where I can just pause, clear my head, and not smell the whisky any more.” 

Rey listened as Ren detailed the memory, nibbled at some sopressata, and Ren favored her with a soft smile, sucked in a long breath of air. 

“He asks me if I’m okay,” Ren said, his lunch and lemonade all but forgotten. “I tell him the truth, which is no, I am not okay, and he shrugs, smiles, and tells me he’s never been okay, so that makes the two of us. And then he introduced himself, and all I could think to say was, ‘I know who you are. My mom punched your dad out.’”

Rey could not help giggling a little at that moment of levity, the way Ren had reintroduced himself to a long lost friend.

“And he just starts laughing like a maniac, the both of us standing in the men’s room, passers by thinking we’re probably doing amyl poppers or nitrous oxide or something. Eventually I start feeling well enough to go back out into the crowd, and he asks me if I’m safe enough to go home when the gallery closes. I tell him the truth, which is that I hadn’t felt safe enough to do so since 2012.” All this was delivered in an intimate voice, almost a murmur, and Ren’s posture softened, slackened as he immersed himself in memory.

“We wound up sitting, him smoking, me not, on the steps of the gallery while we talked, and he told me about his own post-traumatic stress disorder, that it wasn’t anything like what I had gone through, but he could still empathize. He told me about how he got it, about his deployments to Iraq and then to Afghanistan. We got rousted off the steps by the Met Police, so he drove me back to his place and we fell into bed together. Lo and behold, we do not fuck. We talk instead, until I fall asleep, and he’s still there the morning after, and - I guess we just never stopped seeing each other since then.” Ren capped his recollections with a knowing grin, but the archness of the expression was lost behind the warmth in his eyes, that intensity in his gaze every time he talked about Hux.

“That’s romantic,” Rey said, thinking of the both of them lying side by side, still dressed and talking the night away until the gloaming of false dawn had begun to brighten the sky.

Ren shook his head, sending locks of his hair bouncing on his shoulders, beside his neck. “‘Tage calls _me_ romantic, but it’s like that proverb about pulling the log out of your eye first? The first time he told me about you, he told me he couldn’t stop thinking of you because you looked terrified, that looking into your eyes in that photograph the agency sent him reminded him of himself when he was younger. I warned him not to get too into it emotionally - I was afraid he’d try to rescue you, you know, accidentally take over your life.”

“Yes. He tries very hard not to,” Rey said, as past experiences started to make more sense in context of what Ren had told her. He sometimes bought her things he liked her to wear during their trysts, like the stockings, but his other gifts had all been chosen for her tastes, and not for his. Even the jewelry he gave her had been understated, beautiful because of its craft instead of its gaud.

“So he tells me, ‘Kylo, you don’t understand, the agency is auctioning her off to the highest bidder because she’s a virgin, and they’re not cutting her into the profit they stand to make,’ and I realized then it was less about wanting to rescue you, and more that he was profoundly pissed off with what they tried to pull.” 

Rey laughed a little bitterly at the way Ren had phrased it, at the unpleasant memories of how she had been treated like a commodity during her two brief weeks working for the escort agency. It wasn’t as though she romanticized sex work even then, but she had expected more professionalism out of a place charging punters hundreds of pounds at a time. “He told me about that during our first meeting, when we just had dinner. It was a shock to me at the time.”  She had spent a month hoping that Unkar Plutt developed a nasty and intractable case of kidney stones afterwards.

“Yeah, and he told me about the offer he wanted to make you, that you could quit the agency, citing cold feet, and he’d take care of any objections they’d put up. I gotta say this. I don’t really put any kind of moral value on virginity, it’s such a nasty concept if you think about it that way. But I told him that you totally deserved a better lover for your first time than some creep fumbling around and coming too fast, which is probably why he offered to make you his mistress, too.” Two years ago Rey would probably have been flustered, slightly uncomfortable with Ren’s candor. It comforted her now, and she marveled silently at who she had become in the space of two years.

“I owe you a Christmas and birthday present for that,” Rey said after a few moments of silence, shaking her head briefly at how incredibly practical Ren was around sex and intimacy, wondered if Hux had learned his own frank matter-of-factness from Ren. 

“He’s amazing, isn’t he?” Ren asked. The question wasn’t salacious, not quite. It came across as pride more than anything else, pride in his lover and satisfaction at the fact, and joy in being able to discuss his virtues with another. 

“I guess I should be surprised you don’t mind, but I’m not, after all the things you’ve told me about yourself,” Rey said. 

They ate silently for a few minutes, and Kraftwerk gave way to Depeche Mode. 

_Words like violence break the silence, come crashing in, into my little world._

“Look. Don’t repeat this to him, okay?” Ren asked Rey, his gaze suddenly raw with emotion. “‘Tage is afraid to love. He’ll fuck me because I’m not exclusive, so he can justify it as me just being, you know, a slut. Which is fine by me, I am pretty slutty at that, but then sex feels great, so. I know it’s not your job to perform emotional labor for him, but - he lost a lot after what happened to him in Helmand, and it broke him so thoroughly that he had to relearn how to relate to other human beings, and I think what he’s doing with you is faking it until he’s making it.”

“I beg your pardon?” she asked, unsure of how to parse his statement.

“He’s trying to break out of all the abusive shit his dad trained him to do,” Ren said in an attempt to clarify what he had just said.. “He’s terrified of loving someone because he’s sure he’ll ruin their life the way his dad has with so many other people. But you, he pays for you, so you’re safe, you know? He knows exactly why you’re with him, and he can always pass your motives off as financial, so he’s free to be as indulgent as he wants with you without getting overly emotionally involved.”

Something had been building in Rey’s mind through the whole conversation, a truth awakening within her, and she straightened up in her chair with slight alarm. “Kylo. You - you love him.” 

_All I want is, all I need is you in my arms,_ David Gahan sang in the background, _words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm._

Ren let the pleasant façade slip from his face, granted her the honor of seeing the microexpressions slip across his face. Fear and anxiety, but underpinned with acceptance and affection. “More than life itself,” he said hoarsely a few seconds later, “more than my art, more than my vision and touch.” 

Rey thought of Ren’s love against Hux’s fear of of the same, felt her heart ache sympathetically for Ren. “And if you tell him you love him, he’ll - he’ll break it off, won’t he?” she asked. He had told her he wasn’t exclusive, but now she wondered if it hurt him to see Hux with others, herself included. 

Ren shut his eyes as he listened to the lyrics, smiled with a slight sardonic twist of his mouth. “He might, yeah,” Ren admitted, and then took a long breath, a cleansing one. “But you know what, Rey?” he continued, “there are lots of ways to love someone without telling them outright that you do. I hope you’re not going to stop seeing him after what I told you, but I also think it would be better for him - and you - if you knew what was going on.”

Rey blinked hard at Ren’s honesty, and the caring that shone through beneath - he had known her all of a week, and he was telling her things he didn’t have to, because he had Hux’s best interests at heart. No wonder his persona was such an arsehole - someone this innately empathic and loving would hurt sympathetically at the petty tragedies of life, in the headlines and on friends’ social media. He had to let it out somehow, and the performance around his art was a relatively safe way to do so.

“I can’t say I hate the arrangement,” Rey said. “He’s generous, kind to me, and like you said, he’s great in bed. And I guess I am training myself with him, to some extent.” She felt nervous admitting such a raw emotional truth to a man she knew barely, but Ren’s honesty and trust in her put her more at ease. “I’ve never really been loved for myself. My parents only saw the price tag on me, and in the system you’re interchangeable, just a set of hungers and responsibilities to feed and clothe and that’s it. So I don’t know how, really, to love in a healthy way, and it’s easier for me to learn how with him because it’s transactional. The stakes aren’t as high.”

“Yeah. You’re good for each other,” Ren said with a soft smile, “even if you aren’t romantically involved, but that’s totally fine. Friendship is love, too, and I’m so glad he has you to express those feelings to, especially when I’m away from London.” 

“I’d love to call you a friend,” Rey said, realizing that she no longer saw him as an artistic hero. She saw him as a human being instead, flawed and imperfect and all the more wonderful for that, and she liked the man beneath the persona of Kylo Ren. 

“I’d be honored to call you a friend, too,” Ren said. Rey held her hand out to him, and he took it, squeezed it gently, and let go. 

\---

Hux came to pick Rey up at half-past three, and she had been sitting for nearly five hours then. Ren fortunately believed in frequent breaks, but this was the longest she had modeled in a single session.  Most of the university drawing sessions were at most three hours long. 

There was a sound between a click and a rattle, the sound of a key entering a lock, and Rey twitched in surprise. “Don’t worry,” said Ren, without looking up at all, “that’s just ‘Tage, he has a key to the place.”

The door swung open and Hux stepped in, paused at the threshold when he saw that Ren was still busy working. He had started with pencils and charcoal, then glued a sheet of mulberry paper over the Rives BFK. He went over that with thinned India ink so that the contours of her face were laid loosely over her anatomical skull, the bones of her cervical spine, all visible through the translucent mulberry paper. Now he had glued a sheet of sheer vellum paper over the dried inks, and had been working away at it with a Rotring technical pen. 

“S’okay, ‘Tage,” Ren murmured from behind his canvas, “I’m almost done for the day. You can stand up now, Rey, I’m good.” He capped the pen and dropped it onto the ledge of his easel, and Hux crossed the floor to step behind Ren’s easel and have a look at his work. 

“May I?” Hux asked Ren, and Ren only smiled shyly at him and stepped away. He walked over to Rey’s armchair instead, offered her his hand, which she took gratefully. 

Rey hissed as she uncrossed her legs, realized that her right foot had fallen asleep. “You okay?” Ren asked.

“Yes,” Rey said, wiggling her right foot back and forth to get her blood circulation going, “ it’s just pins-and-needles, I should fidget more when I’m sitting for a portrait.” 

“You should,” Ren agreed. He kept his hand outstretched, balancing her easily as she stood on her left foot and tried to work the tingling out. It took a few seconds for the sensation to fade enough that she could walk without flinching, and Ren let go of her hand when he saw her maintain her own equilibrium. “Go ahead,” he told her, “you wanted to take a picture of the work in progress, right?”

Ren edged around the easels set up side by side - one held his preparatory sketch work, and the other one held the portrait. Hux turned to give her a soft kiss on the cheek, and she leaned into it, and then retrieved her phone. The portrait was incomplete, oddly undefined, and it looked as though Ren had managed to conjure her likeness out of a smoking mirror. The vellum on top was marked with pinpoint dots, like a constellation or an exercise in a child’s drawing book. _Connect the dots_ , Rey thought. She took a photo of the prep sketches, and another one of the unfinished portrait itself. “How are you going to finish this, Ren?” she asked him, out of curiosity. 

“I’m going to cut a large piece of muslin about the same size as the paper, hem it and glue it on with spray adhesive. Then I’m going to embroider the outlines with silk thread, use sequins over where the dots sit.” The painstaking craft involved in this execution at once delighted and intimidated Rey. The visual of Ren standing at his easel, pricking the four layers of paper and fabric with a needle, the thread passing through and over and under like nerves and blood vessels - it reinforced his powerful sense of materiality and left Rey just a little giddy, breathless. 

“I don’t want to sound sexist,” she said after she had managed to assimilate the way Ren worked, “but if you showed this without signing it, anonymously, almost everyone would assume a woman had done it. The embroidery, the patience and how meticulous you have to be to pull it off.” 

“Most guys don’t grow up thinking of sewing as an art, but my late biological grandmother Padmé Naberrie was a fashion designer,” Ren said from the other side of his easels. “She worked almost entirely in couture, did a lot of hand-finished stuff. She died before I was born, but my mom inherited many of her gowns from her adoptive mom. Padmé and Grandma Breha were close friends, and that’s why Breha adopted my mom.”

“I’ve seen some examples of her work in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s fashion collection, but I didn’t know she was your grandmother,” Rey said. She didn’t know much about couture fashion except for what she liked and would look good on her, but those 60s gowns had been incredibly beautiful, sewn with an eye for detail and an obvious love for the materials.

“Yeah.” Ren nodded, “my mom started donating parts of the collection to museums when she had me, because she didn’t have the time to maintain her private collection with me playing the part of her toddler-sized destruction zone. As it is she’s going to will the rest of it to the Fashion Institute of Technology’s collection in NYC when she dies, because I sure as hell don’t know how to take care of those the way they deserve to be.”

“Clothing was much more carefully put together before industrialization,” Hux said. “People would have one or two sets of outer clothing, and many sets of underclothes changed and laundered frequently. Valets and ladies’ maids were required not just to help their masters dress, but also to care for the garments. I feel as though we’ve lost something in its passing.” 

“There’s been quite a bit of a revival these days,” Rey said. “I’ve seen tailoring classes on Craftsy, things that the average hobbyist could watch to learn hand-tailoring without needing to apprentice at a tailor’s. Not that I have anything against apprenticeships - they’re excellent for learning craft and process, but tailoring apprenticeships at Savile Row are anything but accessible.” 

Both Hux and Ren nodded in agreement, and then Ren spoke again. “Every once in a while my mom would go into the storeroom and check on the dresses and gowns she still kept, you know, make sure there’s no crease damage or that moths hadn’t gotten in,” he said, his eyes alight with nostalgia, and faint longing. “She would let me watch and I’d be standing there, my hands in my pockets because I already knew better than to touch the pieces. Mom would put on gloves and spread each gown out on a broad cutting table to examine it, and I could just focus in on the details, on how Grandma Padmé would trim seam lines with Petersham ribbon, or bind a neckline with satin ribbon that she scalloped with tiny zig-zag stitches.”

“And that was when you decided to learn to sew?” Rey asked him.

“A little bit.” Ren laughed briefly. “Mom taught me the basics - I can still mend my own clothes and sew buttons back on, but the nice thing about embroidery as fine art is that it never has to be load-bearing. I can’t imagine what would happen if I tried to sew a shirt myself, let alone a suit.” 

\---

“Am I going to have to worry about losing you to Kylo?” Hux asked Rey as they stepped into the privacy of his flat, following their late lunch. It was dark outside, but he had turned the lights on the moment he stepped inside. She studied his face under the warm white lighting wondering if he was serious, but there was a twinkle in his eyes that felt completely at odds with the solemnity of the rest of his face.

“Not while he’s still working on the portrait,” Rey said, “he doesn’t sleep with his models while they’re modeling for him. Professional reasons.” 

“He didn’t tell me that when he did those sketches of me,” Hux said, playfully. He sat down on the ice-blue couch and sighed a little in contentment, and Rey sat down beside him so she could rest her cheek against his left shoulder. She liked it, and she liked knowing that he liked the closeness.  

“That’s because he wasn’t paying you, so there’s no conflict of interest.” Rey had seen those particular drawings in Ren’s current sketchbook, studies in pencil and ink alike. Hux with his hair tousled, lying languid and fucked-out in bed, Hux knotting his tie, Hux playing with his cock, the slow pace of his movements translating somehow through a static drawing.

So many thumbnail sketches of this singular subject, drawn with sensitivity and skill. Rey thought to her own loose renderings of Hux in her own sketchbook, felt at once pleased and intimidated. Her draftsmanship looked slightly scribbly compared to Ren’s sparse lines, but her heavier lines and softly hatched values lent her own sketches a raw sensuality absent in Ren’s own meticulous work. 

Ren exceeded her in skill - there was no doubt about it, but he had also been taking formal art lessons since age 11 and had been practicing for far longer than she had, due to the disparity in their ages. Besides, Rey was only in the second year of her studies, and Ren had spent nearly eight years being coached by other artists in an academic context.

“Is that something you all do?” Hux asked Rey as he unbuttoned his coat and loosened the half-Windsor knot in his necktie. “Draw the people you sleep with, I mean.” 

“I don’t think it’s obligatory,” Rey said slowly as she organized her thoughts on the matter, “but you do see a lot of artists, usually men, taking their lovers for muses, or their muses for lovers. In your case I draw you because you’re very good at staying still. I haven’t found out what Kylo’s reason is yet.” That last sentence was a lie. She knew why Ren drew Hux - because he loved him - but it was not her place to say it, nor would she breach the trust Ren had in her when he shared that secret.

“And to think I thought for a moment that I would be your muse,” Hux said drily, but there was no edge to his tongue. He was merely teasing her, as he liked to do from time to time.  

“I don’t believe in muses,” Rey shrugged. She grabbed gently at Hux’s tie, tipped her face up to kiss him deeply, almost possessively. “Art is 90% hard work to 10% concept,” she said after they had both caught their breath, “if your concept is arse, then your work is still technically acceptable, pleasing despite its lack of substance. If your technique is shite, though, then not even the best inspirations and concepts can save the work.” 

Hux shifted in his place on the armchair. “That’s the thing that surprises me,” he said, “Ren is a romantic, but he’s completely unsentimental about his work, and that seems to hold true for many of the artists I know. The public conception is of the suffering artist, ennobled by pain, whose work is wrung out of his soul, but I suppose that would be rather tiring after a while, wouldn’t it?”

“Tiring and unsustainable,” Rey agreed. “You bring the best version of yourself to your easel, to your workshop, because your work deserves it, and if you’re miserable then it’s going to weigh so much on you that it can eventually burn you out.” She watched Hux as she spoke, smiled at his pensive gaze. “Don’t get me wrong,” she continued, to clarify, “many artists have depression and other mental health issues, but in general we don’t romanticize our misery, or refuse to take medications, because it might be more authentic. You have to be able to function to be able to create.” 

Hux had been looking at her while she talked, his eyes fixed, intent on her expressions. “You’re already very beautiful, Rey,” he said, “but you’re most lovely when you talk about art. It’s obvious that it’s your passion, you live for it, because it animates you, puts an intensity to your expression that is rarely matched, except, perhaps, when you’re begging me to let you come.”

“Is that a hint?” Rey asked. She slipped a hand under his coat to find the placket of his shirt, tucked her fingers in the space between buttons so she could touch his flesh. It was probably entirely Hux’s fault that she had a fixation on men in suits - all the layers of clothing only made him seem more alluring, especially because she had drawn enough naked people that nudity didn’t quite have the impact on her that it once had.

“I’m not sure yet,” Hux said. He closed his eyes in silent appreciation as she continued to caress him through the smooth cotton fabric of his shirt, sighed a little as she used her fingernails to tease his nipple. “I haven’t been sleeping well the past two days. My back.” 

Rey took her head off his shoulder so he wouldn’t have to bear its weight, reached down to caress his thigh through the fine cloth of his trousers instead, the half-lining slippery under the wool. “Would you prefer I just take care of you today, instead?” 

Hux leaned closer to her and kissed her once, twice. He wasn’t as passionate as he usually was, but there was still heat in that gesture, desire underscoring his weariness. “Let’s adjourn to my bedroom and see how I feel when I lie down.”

Rey stood up and extended her hands towards Hux, and he took them for support and leverage, leaning heavily against her as he hauled himself up from the couch. His weight no longer bothered her; she was young and strong and had spent almost a year learning his movements, all the tiny shifts of balance required to minimize his pain. He walked slowly and carefully to his room, and Rey followed two steps behind him, giving him ample room to move as he willed. Hux did not like being crowded when his back was being mischievous; twisting to avoid bumping into someone else could provoke agony like a lightning strike when his muscles spasmed. 

Hux began to undress a little stiffly once he had reached the shelter of his bedroom, and Rey helped him with his sleeves and waistcoat, the back tabs of his braces. Those were all things he found difficult when his back acted up. She let him handle his own necktie and unbutton the placket of his shirt, held her hands out to him again when he stepped slowly out of his trousers. 

Rey put his clothing on the valet stand Hux had not bothered to use last Friday, placing his keys, watch and cufflinks in the small tray designed for that very purpose, and then laid his wallet and phone on the nightstand nearest to him. “I only started wearing braces after I was injured. The pressure from a belt can be very unpleasant, especially during bad weather,” he said as he watched her fold his trousers neatly before she placed them across the center bar of the stand, his braces draped over them. 

“At least you’ll be able to tell if there’s a storm coming,” Rey said. Hux hated pity, was weary of it, and gentle teasing worked far better than sentiment, comforted him more. _He’s always been the kind of man you catch with vinegar, not honey,_ Kylo Ren had said, and she agreed entirely with that assessment. 

“Most people have the Internet for that, these days, but I suppose this is reliable even when I don’t have access to my phone.” Hux lay slowly down, the tightness around his eyes fading minutely as he began to relax. 

“Exactly.” Rey slid out of her leggings - she had already left her cowl, cardigan and shoes in the living room - and unbuttoned her shirt, stripping to her underwear before she climbed into bed next to Hux. 

“You look wonderful, as always,” Hux murmured, and she kissed him on the temple before molding herself carefully to his side. Rey tucked her left leg over his again, knowing that he liked the closeness, the brush of her skin on his, and traced idle circles on his lean chest. 

“You’ve taken your pain medication, I hope,” Rey said, and Hux nodded once, his eyes almost closed. “I did before I came to pick you up at Kylo’s studio,” he said. 

“Good.” Rey felt some of the tension bleed out of his shoulders as his head sank back into his pillow. “When’s your next dose supposed to be?” she asked.

“In about three, four more hours,” Hux answered, “if I’m still in pain then. I have it scheduled on my phone.” 

Rey let her hand wander lower as she caressed his belly. His abdominal muscles were slightly tight, but not as taut as they usually were when his back pained him greatly. “Is the pain easing up, then?” 

“Yes,” Hux murmured. Rey felt him quiver lightly at her touch, as she continued stroking his belly and chest, “I think I just needed to lie down.” 

“Good,” Rey said, and meant it. She pressed a kiss to his shoulder and let her breath linger on the cool, exposed skin uncovered by the duvet. 

Hux slipped his left arm around Rey’s neck in response and ran his fingers through the hair on the nape of her neck, his touch soothing against her scalp as he moved upwards. He definitely was feeling better. “And what about you, my dear Rey, are you comfortable?” he asked her. 

Rey grinned impishly. “Mostly,” she said. 

“Mostly?” Hux asked, turning his head carefully to look at her, “is something the matter?” 

“Well, I don’t like seeing you in pain.” Rey propped herself up on an elbow, and Hux let his hand slip onto her shoulder, where he squeezed gently at her trapezius muscles, caressed her neck lightly enough to raise goose pimples on her skin. “You told me it’s letting up so I’m feeling better,” she continued, “but I might also be a bit pent-up, as it were.” 

Hux laughed, soft and slow for a few moments, the sound vibrating in his chest as Rey continued to caress him. “Maybe you should find the time to rub one out during the school week,” he murmured against Rey’s lips as she leaned down to him for a kiss. 

That kiss became two and three, and then many, each tiny separation like punctuation between touches. “But it’s so much better when I wait for you to help with that,” Rey said a little breathlessly, after they had parted.  

Hux’s eyes were bright, avid with lust, and they gleamed in the bedroom’s low light, under his long eyelashes. “Mm.” 

“I don’t mean that you have to get up right now and fuck me,” Rey said. She pushed the duvet down and rose lithely to straddle Hux’s hips. “Even playing with myself is better when you’re here to watch, and hold me.” 

Hux let his hands wander up her thighs, his thumbs rubbing softly at the illiac crests palpable beneath Rey’s knickers, and she shivered in response as he let his hands slide lower. “You do look so exquisite when you’re drunk on pleasure.” 

“What do you see, Armitage?” Rey asked, suddenly curious, “In my face, when we’re fucking?” 

“You’re so responsive,” he said, and then demonstrated his point by sliding his hands under the lace of her panties, to stroke softly at the sensitive skin just beneath her arse. “You arch into my touch, grind yourself against me. Even your kisses are hungry ones. And the look on your face, your eyes starting to close, those long eyelashes trembling with each pant as your mouth opens. You look - you look as though there is nothing else in the world except the both of us, and you hold yourself so still and taut when you come, it’s almost like a seizure.” 

“Mm. You’re always slightly detached in bed,” Rey said. She leaned over Hux, placing her hands to either side of his pillow, her face mere centimeters from his, and he let his right hand slide up her side so he could explore the texture of the lace on her bralette. “As though you’re playing me like an instrument, listening to me respond, but never letting yourself lose control. You’re good like that, you’re so very good to me, but I wonder what you’d be like if you ever let go.” She hissed softly then at the brush of his palm against the shallow curve of her breast. His thumb drew delicate circles over her nipple, the movement practiced and almost automatic. 

“I don’t know if I even remember how to let go any more,” Hux murmured, and she turned her head to kiss her way up the underside of his chin, following the sharp angles of his jawline as he continued to tease her. “Even my first time - she was older than me, and she knew exactly what she wanted me to do, and how she wanted me to do it. I was desperately afraid of disappointing others, when I was younger.” 

“Well, you’re definitely not a disappointment to me,” Rey whispered just before she nibbled at his earlobe, breathed hot against the delicate skin just beneath. She was finding it slightly difficult to concentrate on conversation at present; Hux had slid her panties off her hips a moment ago, and they hung just above her knees, the gusset slightly damp from her arousal. 

“Good,” Hux said, “I’m glad to hear that.” Rey shifted her weight off her hands, rocked back onto her knees and looked down. He was hard, his prick tenting the silk of his boxers, and she reached down and palmed the sensitive underside of his cock through the slippery fabric. He groaned softly in response, twitching into her touch. 

“Does your back hurt when you arch up like that?” Rey asked, checking in with him to make sure she wasn’t hurting him. She would love to ride him into the mattress, but she was also willing to just maul him until she brought herself off, then suck his cock until he came. Penetration wasn’t everything, even if it did feel quite good to her. 

“No,” Hux said, “but it might be the endorphins.” He hissed again as she continued teasing him, taunting almost in her answer to his earlier touches. Today felt like a day of indulgent mauling, of a slow and languorous fuck. Rey wasn’t entirely sure how she knew, only that she did. She had learned to read his unspoken needs, his tiny little tells, and today he wanted - no, needed to yield to her, to just give himself over to her ministrations. He growled softly as she unbuttoned the fly on his boxers out and shuddered up into her hand when she pulled his cock out. 

Rey paused briefly to reach for the top drawer of his nightstand, to retrieve the lubricant and condoms she knew would be there. “I could keep doing this, if you’d like, bring myself off while you watch, and then let you fuck my mouth.” 

“Off,” Hux said, “get these off me,” and Rey was pleased to comply. She shuffled backwards and tugged down at the waistband of his boxers, appreciated his sharp gasp when his cock snagged on the elastic, and then pulled them off him entirely. She took the opportunity then to slip out of her panties, left them on the floor beside Hux’s discarded boxers. “I love to watch you enjoy yourself,” he said afterwards, “but I also know you like being on top. We could work out a compromise.”

“We definitely can,” Rey agreed as she took her bralette off too, “I could play with myself while I ride your prick, take my pleasure from you, and if you’re good I’ll let you come in my mouth.” 

“Fuck,” Hux hissed, his hips twitching instinctively upwards at the visual. “I would love that. You’re so beautiful when you’re coming. I wonder if I look as graceful, or do I just look constipated?”

“No, you don’t. You close your eyes when you’re getting close,” Rey told him, “and you bite down on your lower lip when you’re trying to last. You look more entranced than constipated, I assure you.” 

“But not graceful,” Hux said. He closed his eyes in appreciation as Rey squeezed lubricant onto her left hand, slicked it up and down his cock, and then began to buck instinctively into her hand when she did not stop.

“We’re having a shag, Armitage,” Rey said before she stopped to open the condom wrapper, “not ice-skating or gymnastics. In fact, I’m not sure I ever want to fuck someone who views sex as a competitive sport.” She had used her dominant hand to lube Hux up, and she improvised by holding the foil package between her teeth so she could rip one of its edges off. “There we go,” she said, once she had extracted the condom. 

Rey thought of something then, and she moved to the unoccupied side of the bed and put the latex sheath between her lips. She sucked down on the reservoir tip, and then leaned down towards the head of Hux’s cock. He shivered at her touch, and then let out a soft sound of pure need as she unrolled the condom onto his prick, letting her mouth follow its way down the slippery latex. That done she pulled her head back a little, shifted her weight so she could hold on to his hip for support as she started to tease him with her teeth and tongue. 

“You’ll want to be careful with that,” Hux panted, his voice shaky in his throat, words underscored with gasps of pleasure, “or you might not get to ride me at all.” 

Rey pulled herself away from Hux’s cock, straddled him again. “I just thought you’d like an appetizer,” she laughed, and he returned her grin with a soft, naked smile. Here he was, no longer armored with reserve and arrogance, supple and responsive like well-worked clay in her hands. 

“I did like that very much,” Hux murmured, and then broke into a soft, high whine when she grabbed hold of his prick to steady him, and then began to lower herself onto him. He held himself very still, slowing his breaths with an effort of will as she rocked down with slow, shallow thrusts. 

“I like being able to do this to you,” Rey said once she had taken the full length of his cock inside her. “I like being able to drive you wild and take you to pieces.” 

“It’s power, isn’t it?” Hux asked. His pupils were huge with pleasure, his green eyes almost dark in that moment. 

“It is, and I enjoy it greatly. Prop yourself up a little,” Rey said, gesturing at the pillow on the unoccupied side of the bed, “I want you to watch me as I play with myself.” She clenched down experimentally, smiled as Hux let out another low groan as he bucked instinctively into her. “Come on,” she said, “We don’t have all evening.” 

“But we do,” Hux laughed briefly as he reached across the bed for the other pillow, shifted into a half-sitting position so he could watch her better. 

“Yes,” Rey agreed, as she began to ride him in earnest, “but I want more.” 

“You always want more,” Hux breathed as he started to fall into rhythm with her, thrusting eagerly up into her cunt as she sank down around him, pulling back when she rose on her knees. He bit his lip and gasped as Rey slipped her lubricant-slick fingers between her thighs, to tease her own clit. She worked her fingers in the small tight circles she preferred, tensing up and then relaxing around Hux’s cock for the pure sensation of it. 

It was good, very good, and she could feel the heat building around her cunt, rising up her spine, but this wasn’t just for Rey’s benefit, and she reached up with her right hand to pinch and tease at her own nipples. “Fuck,” Hux gasped, “fuck,” at the sight of Rey playing with her own small breasts, and she laughed with pure joy and abandon at the pleasure she was feeling, at the way he was moving with and against her. 

“You can help me, if you’d like,” Rey panted between gasps, as she brought herself slowly to the edge, and Hux complied by grasping her hip with his left hand, all the better to guide her movements with each stroke. Rey leaned slightly forwards to give him better access to her breasts, and he cupped her left breast in his right hand, rubbing her erect nipple against the skin of his palm. Rey could feel herself trembling, knew that her first orgasm was imminent. “Are you ready?” she asked him, her movements more mindless, more instinctual with each passing moment. 

“Yes,” Hux whispered, his hips rocking up against hers. “I love to watch you come on my cock.” 

“Good,” Rey managed to pant, and then she wailed softly as Hux pinched down hard on her left nipple, twisting just enough to hurt sweetly. That was all it took to push her off the edge, and she ground her hips down, took Hux’s prick as deeply in her as she could while her cunt fluttered sweetly around him. She didn’t stop, didn’t give herself a break afterwards, only resumed touching herself once the sensitivity faded enough for her to bear it. 

“You’re so wet around me,” Hux said, rutting helplessly into her, “so hot and wet and perfect,” and Rey nodded hard in response. She no longer had the breath to speak and could only pant desperately over him as she came again. It was at once more and less intense; she’d had enough relief that this climax was less of an explosion and more of an aftershock, but she was also so sensitive and high on endorphins that she was close again once the tremors of that second orgasm began to fade. 

“Lovely,” Hux breathed, then gritted his teeth briefly, “you’re so beautiful like this, and it feels so good knowing I can do this to you.” Rey could tell that he was getting closer to climax but was not currently at the brink, which meant that she could go on riding him as hard and fast as she wanted for the time being. She didn’t need to touch herself this time. She only leaned forward so her belly was against Hux’s, her weight held up on her elbows as he kissed her ravenously, possessively with his fingers tangled in her hair, spread across her breast. In that position she rolled her hips and ground her clit slowly down on the bump of his pubic bone, let the pressure bring her off with a loud moan. She shook against Hux in its aftermath, and he whispered encouraging nonsense into her ear as she continued to ride him, his voice breaking against the pleasure that he felt too, with his cock buried deep in the sodden silk of her cunt. 

“Ready?” Rey asked him as she grew closer to yet another orgasm. She wasn’t sure if she could manage another one after this. Her thighs felt like jelly not only from exertion, but from the endorphins singing in her nerves, surging through her bloodstream. Her ears had begun to ring, and her skull felt as though it was vibrating like a tuning fork in her flesh. 

“Yes,” Hux whispered, “yes,” his voice charged with a need that was tectonic in its intensity, pressure like that of two continental plates pushing against each other until something gave. Rey let herself come for the last time, and the world faded from her vision as everything went red and black and white-hot in her brain. She could feel Hux’s hands steadying her as she shook, feel him slow his thrusts to pace himself. It took her a few seconds to find herself again, and she opened her eyes to find herself lying on top of Hux. He groaned and rocked up into her again, and she hissed as his prick rubbed up at the oversensitive membranes of her cunt. 

“Enough,” she panted, once she had caught her breath enough to speak, and Hux held himself still with an effort of will, gasping against the sensation as she lifted herself off him. “Would you like to come in my mouth?” she asked him, knowing the answer was yes, and he nodded eagerly, let himself sink further down into the pillows.

“Please,” Hux said hoarsely as she climbed off his hips to settle herself comfortably on the empty side of the bed. Rey rested her head briefly on his left thigh and caressed his balls, her fingers teasing wickedly against the crease of his scrotum before she propped herself up again and took his slippery cock in her mouth, condom and all. He smelled like her, tasted salty-sweet from her own spendings, and she kept her left hand closed around the base of his prick, squeezing firmly and hard every time he started thrusting too hard in her mouth. 

Rey drew the blowjob out for a minute or two, reduced Hux to incoherence before she let him spend, and she pushed down hard against his perineum, just behind his testicles just before he did. Hux howled long and low as his relief overtook him, and Rey pulled herself back, kept the head of his sheathed cock in her mouth while he bucked and trembled against her. He lay very still afterwards, his chest rising and falling, and he only hissed softly, once, when Rey pulled the condom off his softening prick and knotted the open end.

“You look a little better now you’ve come,” Rey said, and it was true. Hux always looked better with his hair tousled, flushed with pleasure. It lent a warmth to his pallor, shone through him like the sun through a marble statue. He was so slim that Rey sometimes imagined him as a Greek _kouros_ statue, or Donatello’s skinny David, and she ran her hand up his belly as she climbed up to lie beside him, let her palm linger over the throb of his heart in his chest. 

“Thank you, Rey” Hux murmured after he had caught his breath, and Rey chuckled briefly in the dim light. 

“No, thank you,” she said, “neither one of us could have done this alone.”

“Hm,” Hux murmured, pondering the possible permutations, “you’re right, it wouldn’t have been as satisfying if we had tried. I don’t think I was ever flexible enough to fellate myself, even before I had my spine stabilized.” 

Rey grinned, knowing that the expression was lost on him as he lay there with his eyes closed. “You know you’ve probably ruined me for blokes my age, right?” she said, “I don’t know if anyone I fuck after you will be able to meet my exacting standards.” 

Hux laughed softly, tiredly for a few moments, then smiled mischievously at her as he tugged the extra pillow out from under him. He dropped it carelessly, bonelessly over Rey’s head. She grabbed at it and hit him very gently with it, making sure he had the time to pull his arm up to protect his face before it landed. “Enough,” he said after two, three swats from the pillow, “I don’t have enough energy to engage in a pillow fight after this.” 

Rey put the pillow back beneath her head and settled down again beside him, content and slightly drowsy. She wanted to use the bathroom, but that could wait for a few minutes. It was better to stay with him through the afterglow, to keep touching and kissing him as the pleasure began to recede through her veins. 

Hux spoke again once Rey had settled herself comfortably on his shoulder. “How would one select for fitness in bed, in any case? I suppose you could audition, but some men are either clingy or commitment-phobic transitioning from a shag to a relationship. And word-of-mouth is compromised by the fact that you’d be receiving feedback from exes, which means that the men in question might have some horrid, annoying habit.” 

Rey giggled at that. “You’re giving too much thought to this, Armitage, but I suppose any interested applicants could submit their sexual curriculum vitae, with references and perhaps a portfolio of positions.”

“That would be something to see,” Hux admitted. 

“It would, wouldn’t it?” Rey agreed. “Are you feeling hungry?” 

“I don’t think I can move yet,” he said after a few moments of silence, “but I am getting peckish.” 

Rey got up and grabbed the edge of the duvet, dragged it up to cover them. “To think we only had lunch two hours ago,” she said as she snuggled up to him with the duvet tucked just under her chin.

“We burned a lot of calories just now,” Hux said, “you more than I.” 

“If only other forms of exercise were as fun.” Rey kissed him just beneath the ear, teased his ear gently with her teeth, and he began to stroke her head and the back of her neck, his touch slow and indulgent.

—

Rey lay in bed until Hux fell asleep, and then she went to the bathroom and had a quick shower. That done she put on his oversized bathrobe, folding the sleeves up so they wouldn’t cover her hands, and sat by him, reading one of the le Carré novels she found in a bookshelf. He never discussed his work and she did not ask, but every once in a while she wondered if he was involved in intelligence. He didn’t even need to take the Queen’s shilling to do so, the year was 2017 and individuals like Christopher Steele, author of the Trump dossier, worked privately for non-governmental clients. Corporate espionage was a possibility, as was information brokerage.

And yet somehow the idea was too pat, too simple. Hux was too careful and thoroughgoing a man to appear even in society events if his anonymity was important. He would have hidden his fortune behind holding companies and charities, and affected complete, boring mundanity. He wasn’t a flashy individual, but there was enough sparkle and verve in the way he dressed and carried himself that he came across as a more plausible James Bond, which definitely put paid to the notion that he was a spy of any flavor. 

Hux snored quietly in his sleep as he did when utterly exhausted, and Rey glanced over to him from time to time to make sure he was covered adequately by the bedding. He was a restless sleeper when he was physically capable of tossing and turning, and Rey had tugged the duvet right up to his chin once or twice. It was how he preferred to sleep, cocooned almost, sometimes with only the top of his head peeking out of the covers. 

Rey put her book down after half an hour of reading and reached over to shake Hux gently, smoothing the hair away from his brow as he woke slowly. “You asked me to wake you in half an hour,” she said as alertness returned to his gaze.

“Yes,” he murmured, “thank you.” He sat carefully up in bed and rolled his shoulders carefully, testing the muscles of his back for any stiffness or soreness that might precede another painful spasm. All appeared to be well, because he stood up shortly after and stepped into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. 

Rey took the time to dress herself while he showered, and then put on her minimal makeup - compressed powder over spots of concealer, a little eyeliner and tinted lip gloss. Her hair was easy - she had never needed to fuss with it much, and so she left it pulled neatly back, the short ponytail looping back on itself in a slightly messy version of a man bun. 

Hux’s phone started ringing when he was in the bathroom, and Rey stood to pick it up from the valet stand, handed it to him as he toweled himself dry. “Hello,” he said, his expression serious, “yes, this is he.” The warmth left his face so swiftly that it alarmed Rey, and she held on to the doorframe and watched his face harden, composure pulled forcibly over the pain in his gaze, masklike. 

“I see,” he said, his hands beginning to shake. “Yes. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Thank you. Goodbye.” Hux put the phone down on the bathroom counter and stared hollow-eyed at Rey. “That was the University College Hospital. Kylo’s been in a serious accident,” he said.

“No,” Rey whispered, ‘no.” 

“I need to go, Rey,” Hux said. He emerged from the bathroom with his phone in his hand and dropped it on top of the nightstand, began to dress quickly, carelessly. “Kylo needs me.”

“I’ll go with you,” Rey said. He kept missing the buttons on his shirt, and she stepped up to him and helped him with them. He stepped into his trousers and slid the braces back onto his shoulders, began putting on his necktie, fumbling the knot twice.

Rey plucked his waistcoat off the valet stand and helped him put it on, helped him with his cufflinks too. “Thank you,” Hux said numbly after a few moments of silence, and Rey read the sheer effort in the set of his shoulders, the tension in his posture as he fought the urge to weep. “I -“ his voice cracked, then, and he took a long breath, and then another before he dared to speak again. “I don’t think I can do this alone.” 

“I know,” Rey said. 

Hux turned back to his nightstand, unlocked the middle drawer and pulled out a small bottle of pills, dry-swallowed one, two before he shut the drawer and pocketed the bottle. He was breathing hard, and Rey rubbed instinctively at his upper back, let the contact soothe him. “Okay,” he said after a minute of silence, “okay. I’m not going to have an anxiety attack right now.”

“No, you’re not,” Rey said reassuringly, realized that he had just taken his anti-anxiolytics. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have a valid reason for the prescription, but she had never seen him take his meds in front of her before. He had always affected a façade of resilience, and it was difficult to see the pain and fear beneath the surface until that exterior began to crack. 

“I can do this,” Hux said, and Rey embraced him, felt him close his arms around her. He was trembling like a leaf in a high wind. “You’ll be with me.”

“You’re my friend,” Rey said, “and so is Kylo, I’m not going to let either of you deal with this alone.”

“Oh, my sweet Rey,” Hux said in the softest whisper, as the first tears began to run down his ashy face.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux, Ren and Rey are left to struggle with their feelings for each other as Ren recuperates in hospital, and a visit from Leia brings an uncomfortable truth to bear. 
> 
> \--- 
> 
> Content warning: medical descriptions of severe injuries.  
> Content warning: A character has a PTSD flashback.  
> Content warning: Gore.  
> Content warning: Violence.

It became clear to Rey why Hux had needed her company when they arrived at the University College Hospital. She took his hand as they walked in through the doors at Accidents and Emergency and his grip tightened almost painfully on her fingers the moment he smelled the bitter disinfected air. 

“Are you all right?” Rey asked as a tremor went through him, left him quivering like a blade of grass in the wind.

One, two seconds passed as he made himself breathe slowly and deeply and then an absolute rigid stillness spread through him as though he had turned himself into stone. “Yes,” Hux breathed, “I just have bad associations with hospitals. I have to do this. Kylo needs me.”

Rey rubbed gentle circles on Hux’s upper back, the fabric of his suit zinging softly under her hand, as he inquired about Ren at the front desk. The receptionist looked a little quizzically at the both of them, but she kept her manner brisk and polite. 

“I’m Armitage Hux,” he said, “I received a call 15 minutes ago, about K- about my friend, Ben Solo.” Rey saw Hux lean forward, his hands against the reception desk at A&E. It was not an attempt to intimidate - rather, it was more that he looked as though he would fold at the knees if he did not. 

The receptionist clicked her mouse, typed briefly at her keyboard. “Yes, Benjamin Organa-Solo. He told us that you are his partner, and you were also the emergency contact on his phone.” The odd look she had given both Rey and Hux initially made sense now. Rey was too close to Hux, touching him too personally to just be a friend, and she was obviously not his sister. This didn’t matter in their arrangement but it would look cold-hearted to a monogamous individual. 

“Oh.” Hux paused, taken slightly aback at the revelation that Ren had made their relationship official. Rey thought it made sense to do so, given the situation. “Yes, yes I am,” he continued, “his family is currently in the United States.”

The receptionist nodded somewhat more gently than she had earlier, reading the pain and anxiety in Hux’s body language. “Give me a moment, and I’ll get someone to show you to to him,” she said. 

That someone turned out to be an exhausted-looking nurse. It was close enough to the end of his shift that his stubble had started to show on his cheeks and chin, and he spoke with the softest hint of a Polish accent. Marek, his name tag read. Marek Pianka. “The car Mr. Solo was in,” he said as he led them to the trauma bay where Ren currently was, “was involved in a multi-vehicle collision. He is seriously injured, if not critically so, but Dr. Patel wants him in surgery as soon as possible.”

The stark white fluorescent lights overhead seemed to bleach the color from everything, Pianka’s scrubs, the paint on the walls. The staff looked grey and grim, like the walking dead, but their movements were swift and purposeful. Ren lay very still in his bed, his eyes closed and his modesty protected by a blanket, but his chest rose and fell regularly despite the nightmare of blood-red and purple-black bruising on his flank. His right arm was stiffly splinted from knuckle to armpit, and Rey saw two IV bags hanging on a drip stand - one clear, and one a dark, rich red. A broad white bandage was taped over his forehead, extending to cover most of the right side of his face, and there was an oxygen mask over his face.

“Mr. Hux,” a tall, handsome woman said without preamble, accosting them just before they came into Ren’s earshot, “I am Dr. Patel. You must be Ben Solo’s partner.” She too was clad in scrubs, albeit with a white coat over it. Her stethoscope was draped about her neck like a stole, earpieces to one side, bell to the other. The expression on her face was hard, stern, but not without kindness, and she glanced over to Rey and raised an eyebrow.

“Rey is a friend of ours, she’s here for support,” Hux said, his voice almost a sigh, “I have severe anxiety around hospitals. Afghanistan.” 

Dr. Patel’s expression softened slightly, and she nodded crisply at Hux. “Mr. Solo is seriously injured but stable,” she said in a soft, husky voice, “but we are concerned enough about his condition that we’ll be moving him to surgery shortly.” 

“How are his injuries?” Hux asked, lowering his own voice in case Ren was conscious, so he wouldn’t have to listen to them discuss him like a piece of damaged equipment.

“The usual blunt trauma one associates with vehicular accidents; he has several cracked ribs, a blowout fracture of the right eye socket, lacerations, contusions.” Dr. Patel counted Ren’s injuries off on her fingers, switched hands as she spoke. “Sonography indicates minor internal bleeding around the liver, but it’s not severe enough to warrant a laparotomy - I’d prefer to observe him and see if it stops on its own. The most severe injury is to his right arm - we are dealing with a closed complex fracture of the radius and ulna, and a dislocation of the elbow. All those injuries, together, are associated with limb-threatening levels of soft tissue compromise.”

Hux flinched. “You mean to say that he might lose his right arm.” 

Dr. Patel nodded, shrugged easily. “That’s only in the worst-case scenario. It’s a possibility, albeit not a great one. Mr. Solo is stable enough for orthopedic surgery. We’ll stabilize that fracture and reduce that dislocation.”

“May I -“ Hux paused then, shivered, and Rey continued rubbing slow circles over his shoulders, “may we see him?” 

Dr. Patel shrugged. “He’s conscious, and we’ve administered painkillers. I don’t see a problem with that.” She stepped aside to let them past her, and Hux nodded gratefully at her as she did so.

Ren stirred in his bed as he heard Hux and Rey approaching, his eyelids fluttering briefly before he opened his eyes fully. “Hi,” he said, his voice hoarse and slightly muffled under the oxygen mask, “glad you could join us.” The flippancy was reassuring - he was at least lucid enough for that.

“Oh, Kylo,” Hux whispered, “you need to stop scaring me like this.”

“You say it like I have a habit of getting hit by trucks,” Ren said, and the backtalk was even more comforting given his battered, peaked appearance. Hux hesitated, hovering over Ren, his eyes very bright from tears. “You can hold my left hand,” Ren said, reading each faltering movement through his good eye as Hux reached out to him, “it won’t hurt. I’m on the good drugs right now.”

Hux took Ren’s hand in both of his, and Ren squeezed down weakly on his fingers, a gesture that drew a long, shaky breath out of Hux’s chest. “Hi, Rey,” Ren continued, “I guess you’ll have to wait a bit for your portrait.”

“That’s not a problem,” Rey told him, oddly touched that he would think of her and his work even now. She wanted to touch him, but Hux had currently taken his hand, so she stepped over to Hux’s right side and began smoothing Ren’s hair away from his brow, out of his eyelashes and off the tape securing the bandages to his face.

“I’m pretty cut up under there,” Ren said as Rey’s fingertips brushed over the edges of the bandage. “I told Dr. Patel to fuck up a little when she fixes that up. I’ve always wanted a dashing scar.”

There was no chair beside Ren’s bed - this was not a regular ward - so Hux bent slowly, stiffly, and pressed his mouth to the knuckles of Ren’s left hand, left a lingering kiss on his fingers. “At least you’re feeling well enough to be cheeky,” he said, his voice almost breaking on the last word.

“Rey?” Ren asked, a little drowsily. Talking had tired him out. “Take care of ‘Tage for me, ok? Make sure he sleeps and stuff.” 

Rey’s knees wobbled briefly as the weight of his trust impacted her. “I will.” How had he said it earlier today? _More than life itself, more than my art, more than my vision and touch._ “I promise,” she said, and Ren nodded briefly in acceptance.

Dr. Patel cleared her throat quietly behind them. “We’ll be preparing Mr. Solo for surgery shortly. I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave.”

“Give me a minute,” Hux said, the pain in his dulled, exhausted eyes almost frantic.

“Go home, ‘Tage,” Ren said, his eyes closed. “Go sleep, they’ll call you when I’m outta surgery, and then maybe we can talk. Or not. Opiates.” 

“Come on,” Rey told Hux, “I’ll be here. I’ll wait with you.”

“Thanks, Rey,” Ren said belatedly as Hux let go of his hand, as Dr. Patel crowded him enough to make him back out of the trauma bay, and Rey took hold of Hux by the arm, led him gently away into the waiting room. 

“It’s okay,” Rey said. Hux was trembling under his suit, his muscles taut and tense, and he didn’t so much walk as much as shuffle in the direction he was pushed. “It’s okay. They’ll take good care of him.” 

Her phone chose that moment to buzz in her handbag. “Excuse me,” she said, before she stepped aside, drawing Hux with her. A text had come in from Rose. _Rey, you’re late for your check-in. Are you okay?_

 _I’m at the University College Hospital,_ Rey punched in, _it’s not me, a friend of mine got hit by a truck and I just found out._ She hit Send, turned the phone to silent, sans vibration. 

“I can’t stay here,” Hux whispered miserably as she turned her attention back to him. “I want to stay with Kylo, but I can’t.” He had started to shake visibly, tremors running through him as old memories came back to haunt him. 

“Let’s go outside,” Rey said. She grabbed him by the wrist and led him out of the waiting room, out of the main entrance. They passed a junior doctor on a smoke break, the cold light from the hospital interior attenuating into the dark. “Is this better?” she asked Hux, when they were no longer close enough to the A&E to see through the glass doors. 

“Better enough,” Hux breathed, and he wrapped his arms around her, clung to her with a loneliness and desperation that hurt to witness. 

“It’s okay,” Rey told him, even though things were not. It was something he needed to hear right now, and she tucked her arms around his narrow waist, ever mindful of his bad back. “It’s okay. You’re not alone. I’m here. It’s okay.”

Something cold and wet splashed into her hair - Hux was weeping, Rey realized. The junior doctor pinched the butt of his cigarette out, the tiny firefly glow of the cherry winking into nothing, and headed back for the entrance as though neither Rey nor Hux were present. He would be used to seeing people crying outside of the A&E, Rey thought. It would be nothing new, and she was grateful to be ignored presently. She had bigger concerns on her mind.

“I’m sorry,” Hux murmured, his voice wavering as he tried to hold back his tears, “I shouldn’t -“ 

“No,” Rey said, soothingly. She patted his back with her left hand, her palm right over the spot between his shoulder blades where his heart would be. “It’s miserable out here. Let’s find your car.” 

“I don’t know if I can drive right now,” Hux said. He pulled away briefly and pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed stiffly away at the tears on his face. 

“That’s fine,” Rey told him even as she considered transport alternatives, “we can just sit and talk.” 

“Give me a minute. I have to call Kylo’s mum,” Hux said. Rey watched his posture straighten a little as he summoned his discipline, and then he was searching through the contacts on his phone. “It’s probably not the best time to call - US Pacific time is 8 hours behind us, but she needs to know.” 

Hux dialed one of his contacts, and then waited, his back rigid and taut. “Good morning, Ms. Organa. This is Armitage Hux. I’m so sorry for calling you at this early hour, but -“ 

He paused, listening, and Rey saw the tremors break through his control again, the phone shaking in his hand as he continued to speak in the terse back-and-forth required for a phone conversation. “It’s about Ben, Ms. Organa. We’re at the University College Hospital here in London - I’ve just been to see him. He was in an accident. His life is not in danger, but he is seriously hurt. Yes. I’d let you speak with him, but he’s presently in surgery. I will update you as circumstances change. Would you prefer a call, text, or e-mail? Yes. Send me your arrival time when you’ve booked your flight, and I will come to pick you up at Heathrow.”

Rey took Hux’s left hand, and he squeezed gratefully on her fingers as he listened to Ren’s mother talk an ocean and a continent away. “Yes,” he continued, “I will. I’m sorry to be the bringer of such bad news. Thank you. I will see you in a few hours.” He hung up and closed his eyes for a few moments, put his phone back in the inside pocket of his coat. 

“You were listening, of course,” Hux said after he had opened his eyes. It was a statement, not an accusation. 

“Yes, I was,” Rey said, and he gave her hand another squeeze, leaned into her for another hug. 

“Leia - Kylo’s mother - she took that news with remarkable calm,” he said, and Rey rubbed at his back again until the tremors lessened. 

“You know her?” Rey asked after she let Hux go, “I mean, more than as his mum.”

“Professionally, yes. I don’t think she actually approves of me on a personal level,” Hux laughed bleakly, shook his head once, twice, “but she loves Kylo, and so she tolerates me for his sake.”

—

Rey made Hux take the back seat of his Audi, and she slid in beside him, the windows unrolled just enough that they would not stifle in the silent stillness of the parking deck. Hux habitually kept a blanket folded neatly in the back seat of the car, and she took it up before he sat down and made sure to tuck it around his lap and hands. He was in enough emotional shock that he felt icy to the touch, and it felt like the right thing to do in this case. 

“Is this helping?” Rey asked, once she’d settled him down. He blinked slowly, shivered a little, and then nodded. “I wanted to get you away from anything that would make you think of - bad things,” she said, groping for the appropriate words, “and I thought this would be different enough.”

“Yes,” Hux sighed, the tremors increasing as he let his self-control slip. It was a good sign, Rey thought cautiously, it meant that he was feeling safe enough to let his distress show instead of pretending it did not exist, which he much preferred to do in public. “Thank you, Rey,” he said.

“Good.” Rey fished around in her handbag for something, found it and pulled it out with a crinkle of foil. “We’ve both missed dinner,” she told Hux, “but I always carry emergency chocolate in my purse.” She broke the bar into pieces while it was still in its wrapper, and then tore off the paper and foil to reveal the dark, silky fragments. “Open your mouth,” she said, and Hux complied. She snapped off a square of dark chocolate, and fed it to him. 

Hux chewed in silence, his eyes slipping shut as the bittersweet flavor and fragrance of the confection distracted him from his anxiety and grief. The shaking got worse for a few seconds, and Rey gave him another piece of chocolate when he had finished the first one. The tremors faded finally, went away, and he opened his eyes slowly, wearily.

“It isn’t your job to take care of all my emotional needs,” Hux murmured softly as Rey ate a piece of chocolate herself, “but I’m glad you’re here with me now, because you are very good at it.” 

“You learn some things growing up in care,” Rey said, thinking back to the times she had been placed with a foster family with other hurt, distressed children. Some of them, the older ones, had been violent, had taken their rages out on her. The others, mostly little ones, had clung to her desperately and she had not the heart to refuse them. “There are so many people in pain around you, and - I learned to cope, I suppose.” 

“Mhm.” Hux sighed softly and closed his eyes again, and Rey reached beneath the blanket to touch his hands, found them warmer than before. Good. 

“Ren won’t be out of surgery for a while yet,” Rey said carefully, her fingers still on his, “and you’ll be better equipped to take care of him if you get some sleep.” The tremors did not return to his hands, which she took as a good sign. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to try and rest here,” Rey continued as Hux remained silent, “you really should lie down. I can’t drive you home, but I can call Phasma. She can.” 

Phasma was Hux’s personal assistant, and Rey had met her several times, mostly while she was on the way out of Hux’s flat just before one of Rey’s appointments with him. Rey assumed that Phasma was in the know about her arrangement with Hux; she was close enough to Hux that she cared personally for him when his back forbade any activity more strenuous than lying abed and waiting for the pain to end. 

Hux had probably sought Phasma’s guidance when acquiring gifts for Rey, at least until he had become more familiar with what Rey liked. Several of his earlier presents bore the hallmarks of Phasma’s sense of style, all charcoal and crimson and brushed silver. Rey liked her, found her at once beautiful and sightly forbidding, like a human version of a Richard Serra sculpture.

“No,” Hux murmured. “She’s not in London right now, I gave her the week off. I think I can manage driving.” 

“Are you sure?” Rey asked him, and he nodded. She felt him close his fingers upon her hand, and she gave him a reassuring squeeze under the blanket.

“I just -“ Hux hesitated, paused to collect himself before he spoke again. “I just don’t want to go back to my flat. I’m not sure what I’d do there. Pace the floor, I suppose.” 

“I could stay with you tonight, if that will help,” Rey said. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t done just that before. 

Hux sighed again, long and low and exhausted. “I know this is an irregular request, but could I spend the night with you instead?”

“At my flat, you mean,” Rey said. 

“Yes.” Hux nodded briefly, and Rey broke off another piece of chocolate, offered it to him. 

“I don’t see why not,” she said after he accepted the sweet, and they waited in silence for him to finish eating it. 

“What about your flatmates?” Hux asked Rey, after he had swallowed his third bite of chocolate. The fraught tension in him was gone, replaced with a dull-eyed, bone-deep sadness that she had glimpsed only once or twice before today.

Rey kissed Hux on the corner of his jaw, pressed her forehead against his shoulder through the sleeve of his coat. “That’s none of their business,” she said, “they bring their dates back too. We should probably stop by your place first, though. Pick up your medications and make sure you have what you need for an overnight stay.” 

“Yes.” Hux pushed the blanket off his legs, stuffed it in the space between himself and Rey in the back seat. “Thank you, Rey,” he said, before he opened the door and staggered out to take the driver’s seat. Rey got out as well, took the passenger seat beside him, and she squeezed his hand once again before she put on her seatbelt and he turned the key in the ignition. 

— 

Hux began the drive back to his flat slowly, carefully as though he did not trust himself at a faster pace, and he talked softly to Rey over the purr of the motor and the wind outside. “I was deployed to Helmand from March to August 2007, with 1 R ANGLIAN as part of the 12th Mechanised Brigade,” he said very quietly in a voice that Rey had to lean in to hear. “You have to understand, I’d seen combat before in Basra, and while you couldn’t call me a hardened soldier, I was no longer a callow young lieutenant.” 

Rey did not reply. She only reached up to press her fingers on the underside of his upper left arm as he worked his gearshift, rubbed him gently through the sleeve of his coat and the shirt beneath it. 

“Helmand, though. Helmand was unlike anything I had ever seen. The fighting was constant, brutal, close-in. It’s nothing like what the news or the MOD try to sell you - Helmand wasn’t fought with airstrikes, from a distance. Surgical strikes are anything but. It was fought by men killing each other in the dust and dirt every hour of the day.” The words came out slow and measured, a slow drip-drip like blood from a wound, and something about the steady, inexorable pace of Hux’s speech made Rey think of Ren’s installation, of the hourglasses with whisky dripping through them, measuring the lost seconds of someone’s life. 

“We’d had to fix bayonets more than once,” Hux continued, his voice even, too flat at first, and then with increasing animation as the words became easier to say. “I knew the moment I got in my first protracted firefight that I was in no manner experienced enough to handle the situation, and that was a hard thing to accept. But the platoon trusted me, and I had to prove myself worthy of that trust, so it wasn’t really about how unprepared I was as much as how much I was willing to endure beside them.

“The platoon sergeant was - he’s not dead, just out of the Army now - he was incredibly patient with me. I mean from his point of view I was a young toff sent off by Papa to build character by defending civilization from savages. He put up with me because it was his duty to, and I suppose he eventually became used to me. He’d show me pictures of his family, his wife, three children, not so much to guilt-trip me as much as just to remind me that there were things worth fighting for. That even if I didn’t have a spouse or family to live for, that I could have that future. That kept me - I can’t say sane, I’m obviously not, but it kept me stable enough to lead.” 

Hux paused when they stopped at an intersection, closed his eyes for a second as though organizing his thoughts, mustering his will. 

“You don’t have to keep going, Armitage,” Rey said softly in that moment, “I know this is hard for you.” 

Hux shook his head as he watched the light change. “I don’t know. It hurts to say it, but it hurts also to hold it in.” 

“Then keep going,” Rey said. She reached out and brushed her fingertips against the knuckles of his hand, found him sound and steady despite the difficult topic. 

Hux put his foot back down on the accelerator when the light turned green, and inertia tugged gently at them as the Audi picked up speed. “We were ambushed in the middle of August,” he said, after a deep breath, the words coming out in a rush. “I can still remember the heat, the way my own blood smelled in the dirt. It was officially a routine patrol, but I had learned by then that there was no such thing as a routine patrol. What we were meant to do was to draw Taliban fire so we could counterattack and call down artillery, a standard tactic, but there were more fighters than we had expected hiding in the irrigation channels nearby.” 

Hux’s knuckles went white as his grip tightened briefly on his steering wheel, and then the paleness faded as he made himself let go. “Mike - the platoon sergeant, that’s his name - he was caught in the open with no cover, and bullets were flying, someone fired an RPG over my head. I thought of his wife and his children, and I thought of them having to live the rest of their lives without him, of the letter I’d have to write if he died, and something just broke. I think it was the stress, the prolonged fear,” he said evenly, almost reasonably as though he were discussing the weather, “the certainty that we had been flung into a meat-grinder of a war that had no end, but I came out of cover. I came out of cover, and I tackled him into the nearest ditch I found.” 

Rey remained silent, listening, watching as something came unclenched in Hux’s posture, in the set of his shoulders and back, and she reached gently up to his head and caressed the shell of his ear quietly, intimately, and he leaned into her hand for a second. 

“That was not the most intelligent decision, I suppose,” Hux continued. “I gave Mike a hard push, both my arms around his chest as I bore him down with my body weight, and - the edge of my Osprey body armor rose a bit, you know, the way a shirt does when you raise your arms. I was wearing Kevlar underneath the ballistic plates, but Kevlar alone can’t stop a 7.62x39.”

Something in Hux’s voice made Rey bite down on her own lip then - that slight tremor against the terrifying calm, that polished public school accent underlaid with a profound sense of trauma. “I was hit twice,” he said. “The same shooter both times, I’m fairly sure, because both the entry wounds were just centimeters apart. He must have been a good shot to land those two hits on me, a moving target, with a Khyber Pass knockoff AK. It was a surprise that getting shot didn’t really hurt. Felt like a hard punch. Mostly I felt cold, cold and very drowsy, and the dirt was so hot against my face, almost scalding. I could hear Mike shouting for a medic, I could still hear the gunfire ongoing, neverending, but it was as though I had lost all the will to care. I couldn’t feel my legs, and I was very sure I was going to die, and I was at peace with dying.” 

Hux let out a long, low breath as though he had been holding it, sagged somewhat as the Audi came to a stop at yet another intersection, and Rey took his hand this time. He squeezed her fingers hard, once, and then let go. 

“Everything breaks up about then,” he said at last over the red light. “I’m casevaced, and I remember seeing the inside of the helicopter, but everything comes in bits and flashes. I don’t really remember much of what happened after that.” 

Green light. The Audi shot forward again, picking up a little more speed than before as Hux fought his way through old memories back to the present. “The next thing I remember,” he said, “is the field hospital. The lights are bright over me, they hurt my eyes, and someone is screaming. People are holding me down and I don’t understand why they’re so frantic, and then I realize that I’m the one who’s screaming, because it felt like someone had injected fire into my spine. It hurts down to my fingertips, to the roots of my hair and I can hear my blood pattering on the floor as it runs out of me in fat drops. I recall wondering how much is on the floor of that chopper, in the dirt, because there can’t be much left in me. They’re cutting the rest of my uniform off, someone’s slicing at the laces of my boots with a knife, because I can hear the laces pop one by one over the monitors, the trauma team talking to each other.” His grip on the steering wheel had tightened again, his knuckles white, and this time Rey truly did not know what to say. 

Rey thought of the story Ren had told her earlier, when she posed in his studio for the portrait. He had talked about how Hux had told him about the post-traumatic stress disorder, about all that pain, simply to let Ren know he wasn’t fighting his sorrows alone. She wondered if it was easier to tell someone who was similarly hurt, decided that it was so. _Armitage understood why Kylo couldn’t talk to anyone about his own trauma, because he was in the exact same position._ It was no wonder that they had bonded so intensely from the moment of their unexpected reunion. “That’s why hospitals bother you so much,” Rey said belatedly, connecting what Hux had just told her to the anxiety he had displayed earlier. 

“Accidents and Emergency especially -“ Hux said wearily, his gaze thousands of kilometers away, halfway around the globe. “There’s something about the smell of the disinfectant and the lighting that brings me back to Helmand. It’s been ten years, and I ought to have moved on, but things aren’t really that easy, are they?” And it was over, just like that. The fraught nakedness in his face, the rawness in his voice was now disguised by his purposeful, mannered calm, and Rey could only see the fault lines in his face and composure because she had known him intimately for a year.

“I think you did very well today,” Rey said quietly, “given all the stress you were under.” 

Hux nodded. “I wouldn’t have coped as well without you, Rey.” He paused, and the streetlights cast an ashen orange glow upon his pale face through the windshield. “Thank you.” And again that hauteur, the way he detached himself to receive her praise like a long-stemmed rose, formal and poised.

“Armitage,” Rey pitched her voice so it barely carried over the purr of the motor, the sound of the Audi’s wheels on wet road, “thank you for telling me about what happened to you. I know it must be hard.” It wasn’t as though anyone could overhear her, but somehow she felt protective of this tiny bubble of relative peace, felt as though speaking too loudly could disrupt its membrane and pop it instantly. 

“It is.” Hux sighed softly and swallowed a yawn behind one of his bony, elegant hands, but he kept his eyes fixed on the horizon and away from Rey, refusing to meet her gaze. He had bared some of his soul to her, and now he wanted privacy again, and she did not press him.

— 

The light was on in the living room of Rey’s flat when she let herself in, Hux a half-step behind her. Rose was curled up on the sagging sofa with a blanket pulled over her face, the television still on. She sat up when she heard Rey open the door. 

“Rey?” Rose asked, groping for her glasses on the coffee table. “You’re home.” She put them on, blinked once to clear her vision, and then blinked again as she registered Hux standing in front of the closed door, his overnight bag in his hand. 

“You didn’t have to wait up for me,” Rey said, feeling at once touched and embarrassed that Rose had done so.

“I thought you might want me to sit up with you, after the message you sent. Are they okay?” Rose asked. She pulled the blanket off her lap and stood up to reveal the pajamas she was wearing, the set in Ravenclaw colors that Paige had bought her two Christmases ago.

“My friend’s in surgery, but he’s not in danger of dying. We’ll learn more tomorrow,” Rey said. An empty takeaway container rested on the coffee table beside an empty beer bottle - the remnants of Rose’s solitary dinner. 

“And him?” Rose tipped her head towards Hux, raised an eyebrow. 

“Rose, this is my friend, Armitage Hux,” Rey said with as neutral a tone she could manage, “Armitage, this is one of my roommates, Rose Tico. Hux is spending the night with me, just for tonight. He’s had a difficult day.” 

Rose’s eyes widened a little behind her glasses as the name registered in her mind. She gave him a once-over, appraising the bespoke suit, the pallor above his collar and the dark circles about his eyes, the traces of tears on his cheeks, and then she nodded once. “You both look like you should sit down. I’ll make some cocoa.” 

“Thank you, Rose,” Rey said. She stepped aside from the door and hesitated, glanced at the bright blanket on the sofa. “Armitage, would you like to sit down here, or would you rather just go straight to my room? Either of those would work.”

Hux waited until he drew closer to Rey to reply. “If I sit down now I’m not sure I’ll be able to stand back up. My back.” The last two words were mouthed, not said, as though he were ashamed of intruding upon the life she led away from his appointments. 

“Of course,” Rey said soothingly. “Rose, we’ll be in my room for a bit. I’ll come back out for my cocoa.” 

“Sure,” Rose said, busying herself with the microwave.

Rey’s room was cluttered but clean, with her portfolio case stood up against one of the walls along with a large plastic bag full of finished drawings, each separated from the others with archival tissue paper, and the whole affair pinned to the wall with tacks. Books and textbooks were piled up on the empty side of her bed, and her work desk had somehow become an improvised dresser table, with half her makeup collection piled up beside her laptop.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” Rey said as she scrambled to clear the books off her bed. The textbooks were heavy things with slippery covers, and she eventually just dropped them with a low thud on the floor beside her bed, realizing belatedly that the tenant downstairs would probably have heard that. And then she thought of the times they had kept her up with their music, and decided that she could live with this tiny rudeness, and shrugged it off. 

“No, you’re a busy uni student,” Hux said as he sat wearily on Rey’s bed. “This is typical.” 

That statement made Rey wonder what Hux had been like fifteen or sixteen years ago, fastidious and correct as he currently was. “I’m somehow sure your rooms looked tidier than mine when you were at Oxford.” 

“Oh, no, Hux said with a brief, tired laugh, “absolutely not. There is nothing so vile as a nineteen-year-old man’s dormitory bedroom, especially near the end of the term.” 

Rey shook her head, unable to stretch her imagination that far after her long, stressful day. “I can’t imagine you being untidy,” she said. She sat down on the bed, too, and undid her winter boots, kicked them off her feet before she lay briefly down, staring at the comfort of her familiar ceiling. 

“Oh, I’m still fully capable of it,” Hux said. He shed his coat and reached up to loosen his necktie. “I’ve just also gotten too old to abide the resulting mess, and too lazy to not hire a housekeeper.” 

“You’re not old,” Rey laughed. The gap between their ages had felt vast during her first appointment with him, the one where they just had dinner and discussed her options, but now things were different, and she could not clearly articulate why. She took Hux’s waistcoat and hung it up on a spare wooden hanger, took his jacket too, and watched as he worked the buttons of his own shirt.

“Chronologically, perhaps not,” Hux admitted, a narrow sliver of skin showing in the open front of his shirt, “but I don’t think I was ever young in the first place. And neither are you, Rey. Yours is an old, experienced soul.” 

“Well,” Rey said just a little flippantly, “good thing I don’t believe in reincarnation, so I’m exactly as young as I want to be.” 

—

Rey tucked Hux safely into her bed and left him resting with the reading lamp on and one of his books in his hands before she stepped back out into the living room to join Rose. 

“So that’s him,” Rose said softly. She held a mug of cocoa and handed Rey another, which she accepted gratefully as she sat down at the dining table. “I thought he would be older. Also much less pretty.” 

“Yeah,” Rey said after a long, soothing swallow of hot cocoa, “me too, when I first met him.” The communal biscuit tin sat in the middle of the table, and Rey popped the lid off and checked its contents. It was Rose’s turn to top the tin up this week, which mean there would be custard creams and Jammie Dodgers within. 

They sat, sipping in silence for a few moments, before Rose spoke again. “Is his bad day connected to the friend you have in hospital?” 

“Yes,” Rey said. She took another drink of cocoa to cover her hesitation, sure that Rose Tico, of all people, didn’t need to know everything about Hux’s personal life. “Kylo - the friend in hospital, he’s a mutual friend of ours, and Hux has known him since they were children.”

“It must’ve been bad, then.” Rose frowned slightly, took her glasses off and wiped the fog off the lenses. Steam from the mug was condensing on them, occluding her vision.

“His life isn’t in danger,” Rey said, “but his right arm is badly broken. There’s a chance he could lose it, and that’s a big concern. He’s a painter and photographer, and he’s right-handed.” She plucked a jam-filled biscuit from the tin and bit down, grateful for something a little more solid than mere chocolate.

Rose frowned a little as she cudgeled her memory. “Haven’t I heard of a painter named Kylo somewhere? You mentioned him once or twice, didn’t you?” 

Rey nodded, finished her biscuit before she spoke again. “I’m amazed you remember anything I tell you about school. You’re a mechanic, art must bore you.”

“Well, I still don’t see the point in putting an unmade bed in a museum and calling it art,” Rose shrugged, “but I like hearing you talk about what you do with it. Isn’t he supposed to be this brilliant genius?” She took one of her favorite custard creams out of the tin and pulled the halves apart, began licking at the filling stuck to one side.

“Kylo Ren? Yes,” Rey said. She wondered if there was anything in the refrigerator she could feed Hux. “He gave a talk at Goldsmiths two months ago.”

“Oh.” Rose dunked her naked biscuit half in the cocoa, and then ate it, dunked the other half in preparation to do so. “That’s when you mentioned him. You told me he was very good-looking.”

“He is,” Rey said, knowing that Ren was not at all Rose’s type, “if you like them tall, dark and slightly manic. And somewhat battered, at this point.” 

“Sounds like an absolute dream. No, I’m sticking to the nice boring blokes, someone like your cute classmate Finn,” Rose let the tiniest hint of a smile spread across her face as she thought about him, “he’s probably never going to set London on fire, but that’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

“Good luck with that,” Rey said with mock graveness, “if he ever stops crushing on Professor Dameron.” 

“Who’s also supposed to be fit, according to you,” said Rose. She pulled another biscuit from the tin and pulled it in halves again, began eating the jam so she could dunk the shortbread halves in her cocoa. 

Rey laughed tiredly, managed a weak grin. “Poe Dameron is astoundingly handsome. I seem to find myself surrounded by gorgeous men, it’s a little ridiculous sometimes.” 

“Maybe you live in a romance novel reality,” Rose said with a gentle huff of laughter, “which I’d rather not, really. If you follow the plot there’s going to have to be misunderstandings and heartbreak and at some point your bodice gets ripped open and the sex reads like a gardening manual.” 

“As I understand it modern romance isn’t quite so cliched, you know, and the sex I have does not involve gardening at all.” Rey could not resist the urge to say that, not to Rose, who was almost but not quite a sibling, and therefore exempt from the TMI filter she applied to her friends.

“Thought sex would involve more ploughing than gardening,” Rose shrugged, her expression just a little too satisfied to be completely deadpan, “and I don’t have a green thumb. I’ll stick to my lack of a personal life and murder mystery novels, thank you.” 

“At least until Finn comes to his senses?” Rey asked, teasing her gently in retaliation.

“If he ever does, yes.” Rose waved to the kitchen counter, where Paige’s mug sat covered with a saucer over it. “I didn’t know if - you know, if Hux would like a cocoa, but I made one for him anyway, because I thought I could always drink it if he didn’t want it.” 

“Thank you, Rose. You’re a saint.” Rey drained her mug of cocoa, ate another biscuit, and then sat up as a thought came to her belatedly. “Is there anything in the fridge I can feed Hux? Neither of us has had dinner and he’s got some dietary restrictions.”

Rose shrugged. “I had dinner delivered. I know there’s bacon and eggs, we’ve got some bread left over, but I also don’t know what he can’t eat.” 

Rey put her mug down on the dining table and pushed her chair back, got up to look in the refrigerator. Rose’s assessments were correct. Milk, eggs and the remnants of this morning’s bacon wrapped in butcher paper. There was a sealed packet of smoked haddock on Paige’s shelf, and a brace of hard tomatoes Rey had intended for a salad until she realized they were the texture of billiard balls. 

“He doesn’t eat animal protein, except for fish, and he can’t do rich food. Could you tell Paige that I appropriated her pack of Finnan haddie?” Rey asked Rose, as she took that, the eggs and the tomatoes out of the fridge. She laid them in a neat line on the counter top before her like she saw chefs do on cooking shows, and then realized that she wasn’t entirely sure how to assemble those ingredients into a meal. 

“And how are you going to cook all that?” Rose asked her, after she had drained her own mug of cocoa.

“I have,” Rey paused, glanced helplessly at her roommate, “absolutely no idea.” 

“About that.” Rose stood up, placed both the mugs in the sink. “Why don’t you let me do the cooking, and you bring your gentleman his cup of cocoa?”

“Would you, Rose?” Rey asked, sure that this was something of an imposition.

Rose shrugged in her usual cheerful, easygoing manner. “There’s no point in making his terrible day worse with your attempt to cook, right? And don’t get angry with me for that, you really can’t.”

Rey laughed, a little embarrassed but amused all the same, “I never claimed to make a good wife,” she said.

“Well, no,” Rose agreed, “but I’m also fairly sure you never want to get married.” 

“There is that,” Rey nodded, picked up the mug Rose had left on the counter for Hux. “I’ll be in my room. Please knock or send me a text if you need me.” 

—

Hux and Rey finally managed to fall asleep somewhere past midnight, after their supper of scrambled eggs and smoked haddock on toast, with fried tomato halves as the sole concession to a balanced diet. She made sure he was comfortable and had his medication to hand, and then stripped and fell into bed beside him. Hux clung to her in the night, the top of his head pressed up against her chin, and she inhaled the faint, faded scent of his cologne, the juniper oil in the pomade he used in his hair, all overlaid with the stale smell of fear-sweat and anxiety and the ghosts of the menthol cigarettes he smoked so infrequently. It was clear why he wanted to be here with Rey tonight - it wasn’t just her presence he needed, but also an environment that carried no emotional charge for him, so he could try to outrun his nightmares. 

Rey felt good to have Hux here in her room, in a space that was hers, divorced of all context. Curled up in her arms like this he felt like an artifact of a different time collaged into the life she led apart from him, and she fell asleep aware that she liked him still, that she could grow to love him if circumstances had been different. 

She did not mourn what they did not have - only acknowledged that it as one possibility among many others. Her sleep was the deep dreamless slumber born of utter exhaustion, and she did not wake until the next morning. She yawned as she came slowly to consciousness and glanced across the bed to find Hux’s back to her, his phone held loosely in his left hand as he checked his notifications. 

“Good morning,” Rey murmured, looked over at the glowing dial of her alarm clock. It was a little after 9AM.

“The hospital called me just ten minutes ago,” Hux said slowly, his voice flat, almost relaxed in the early morning darkness. The glow from his phone screen and Rey’s alarm clock were the only sources of light in the bedroom, with the curtains drawn. “Kylo’s out of surgery, and has been for hours.” 

Rey blinked, rubbed the grit out of her eyes. “I thought they would call you once he was out of surgery.”

“They would have, yes,” Hux said with a half-chuckle, “but Kylo told them not to before they put him under sedation. He only just gave them the okay fifteen minutes ago, and asked to speak to me personally. He said it was the only way he could think of to make sure I slept last night.” He shook his head, at once annoyed and relieved.

“How is he?” Rey asked. She sat up in bed, and then reconsidered and crawled back under the sheets and duvet when the cool air touched her bare skin. 

Hux put his phone back down on the nightstand and rolled over to take Rey in his arms. “He’s still under observation for his internal injuries,” he said, “but the surgeons saved his right arm, thank goodness. There might be some nerve damage, it’s hard to tell with all the soft tissue damage, and they’ve had to perform a fasciotomy to prevent compartment syndrome. That’s when damaged tissue swelling cuts off circulation to a limb entirely.”

“Ugh.” Rey pressed her face against his shoulder, and then settled herself next to him. “Can we visit him?”

“He told me he wanted to sleep more of the sedation off, so it’ll be better if we decide to see him at about ten or eleven, after we acquire breakfast and make a side trip to his flat to get some of his belongings.” Hux closed his eyes as he thought, and Rey listened to the thrum of his voice in his chest, the slow throb of his heart as she ran her fingertips gently over his scarred belly. “I told him his mum is coming to see him, and Ms. Organa sent me her flight number and schedule while we were sleeping. She’ll be here 1:15PM London time; she’s already over the Atlantic. I’ll have to pick her up at Heathrow after I visit Kylo, drive her to the hospital.” 

“I suppose we’ll have to get up,” Rey sighed. The bed was so warm and comfortable. 

“I suppose we will, yes,” Hux agreed, glancing towards the obscured window with a hint of trepidation.

—

“Rey,” Ren said fuzzily from his hospital bed as they stepped into his room, “‘Tage.”

“Kylo,” Hux whispered fervently, and then he dragged one of the hard plastic chairs to the side of the bed and sat stiffly down, minding his back. “You look better.” Ren did look somewhat improved - his color was better, his face a little less pinched and peaked with pain, and his hospital gown hid the bruises on his flank. The oxygen mask was gone, replaced with a nasal cannula. 

“Yeah. I’m officially a mixed media work, now,” Ren said with a soft huff of laughter. “My right arm’s currently being held together with titanium plates and screws. Or maybe that makes me a cyborg, which is cool, I guess.”

“How are you feeling today?” Rey asked him. She deposited a duffel bag on the floor beside Ren’s bed and took the other chair in the room, sat down on the other side of Ren’s bed with a crinkle and hiss of waterproofed fabric on plastic as her raincoat slid against the seat. They flanked him like the side panels of a triptych. Rey could not help but notice how much Ren resembled the Christ figure out of Caravaggio’s _The Entombment of Christ_ as he lay in his sickbed, with his dark hair spilling in glorious disarray over the white cotton of his pillowcase. 

“Loopy,” Ren said after a few moments of thought, “I’m still on enough painkillers to kill a mule.” His face was still bandaged, and his right forearm was now swathed in a bulky dressing and splinted in place. “Sorry, I’m not going to be a great conv- conversation - I’m not going to be good at talking.” 

“That’s fine, Kylo,” Hux murmured, and then pressed a kiss to Ren’s good hand, letting his lips linger on the knuckles, the backs of his long fingers. 

“That’s only fine until my mom gets here,” Ren said, his eyes closed for a few moments, “then I’ll be completely defenseless when she does the ‘why do you do this to me’ talk. Y’know, ‘you need to settle down with a nice boy or a nice girl, I can’t stay up nights worrying about you all the time’. That stuff.”

“You know your mum’s opinion of me,” Hux said carefully, “I’m not sure I can help much in this case.” 

“She doesn’t hate you, ‘Tage.” Ren said. His face crinkled up in a goofy grin, but he kept his eyes shut. “She thinks your dad was a dick, but so do you. Trust me, if she really hated you you’d know it.”

“She can still throw a good punch, I suppose,” Hux said with a soft chuckle. 

“She’s a scary good pistol shot, too,” Ren said. He opened his good eye to glance at Hux, tugged on his hand. “Come ‘ere and give me a kiss.” 

Hux stood up and leaned carefully in to Ren, bracing his weight against the bed as he bent at the waist to bring his face closer to Ren’s. They kissed twice, the first one a cautious, tentative thing and the second one more intense, now that Hux had learned the boundaries of Ren’s pain. Hux caressed the bandaged side of Ren’s face, his long slender fingers brushing featherlike over gauze and tape. “I was so worried about you, Kylo,” he whispered. 

“I know,” Ren said. He lifted his face and kissed Hux on the tip of his nose, and then settled back into bed. “Rey,” he said, turning his head to look at her while Hux sat back down, “thank you for taking care of him.”

“You’re welcome,” Rey said, feeling her cheeks heat with a faint flush at the intensity of his thanks. “What happened last night?” she asked.

Ren sighed, long and low as he let his head sink back into the pillow beneath. “Poor Chloe, poor Trev,” he murmured, and then took a minute to organize his thoughts. “So I was going to dinner with my friends, you know.”

“Yes,” Hux said, barely breathing now as he focused his attention on Ren’s face, on what he was saying.

“It was Trevor and Chloe, Ismail, and me,” Ren said. Rey filled the names in automatically - Trevor Greengrass, painter, his fiancé Chloe Sebright, glass sculptor, and Ismail Shirani, printmaker and occasional underground comic artist. They were all artists Rey had heard about, and it was no surprise that they all knew Kylo Ren. “Chloe was driving because Trev had had a few drinks over dinner, and we were going to drop Ismail off at his studio when one of those big refrigerated delivery trucks ran a red light and smashed into our car. She didn’t manage to get out of the way, the road was slippery, and we got pinned between the truck and some other poor fuck’s car.” 

“Bloody fucking hell,” Hux breathed, and he leaned in again despite his back, rested his brow on the back of Ren’s hand, and Ren pulled his fingers free of Hux’s grip, began smoothing his hair down despite the pomade holding it in place. 

“Chloe didn’t make it,” Ren said, his voice dead and flat. “It was horrible. Ismail was knocked out by the impact, but he was sitting to my left. Good thing I’m so big, I took most of the hit for him. Trev’s hurt too. They had to use hydraulic cutters to free him, so it’s bad.”

“I’m so sorry, Ren,” Rey whispered from her side of the bed. 

“I’m gonna miss her,” Ren said, his eyes still closed, “but it hasn’t quite sunk in yet for me. The meds. Poor Trev. He’s gonna be blaming himself for this for the rest of his life, ‘specially since we had dinner because she wanted to give us the good news. She was expecting. Was gonna be their first. I know how he thinks. He’s going to think, all the time, that if he hadn’t had those drinks he would have been driving, and he would rather die than have anything happen to her. Fuck. I wish I could tell him it’s not his fucking fault.” Rey watched his fingers spasm against Hux’s bright hair, saw Hux turn his head to kiss Ren on the palm of his hand softly, desperately.

“Is he warded here?” Rey asked. She wanted to reach out and comfort Ren, stood up eventually to smooth his hair away from his pale face.

“I don’t know,” Ren said, as he opened his eyes to glance up at Rey, “but I can ask.” He tipped his head briefly towards her hand and sighed softly at the contact, at the comfort she was giving him.

“You could send me as your proxy, if you’d like, once you find out,” Rey offered. 

“I could, yeah,” Ren said, closing his eyes again. “Done your work-experience thing yet?” 

“No,” she said, “I was planning to do it next term.” 

“Okay then,” Ren said. “You’re now officially my intern.” Rey blinked at the declaration, let out a small, ridiculous sound that hovered somewhere between an uncomfortable laugh and a gasp of surprise. “I’ll work out your salary when I can count properly,” Ren continued, “which won’t be today or tomorrow. I’ll email your academic advisor - who is it, Lydia Wendell?” 

“It’s Professor Wendell, yes,” Rey said, going along with Ren’s wholly unexpected job offer. The professional, networking part of her told her that this would be an invaluable experience even while a voice in the back of her head reminded her that it was rude to be this happy around such a tragedy. 

“Okay,” Ren said. “I’ll email her when I’m less doped-up so we can work out the course credit for your internship.” 

“It’s the last two weeks of the term, Kylo,” Rey reminded him, “I don’t think she’s going to let you do that.” 

“Well,” he said, turning his head to look again at her, “I get the feeling I’m going to need your assistance into next year, so you’ll get credit for it next term, at least.”

“That’s one way to get an internship, I suppose,” Rey shrugged. Then she thought of something else. “Do you mind, Armitage?” 

“Why would I mind?” Hux asked her. “Your internship is something between you, whoever you’re interning for, and your academic advisor.” 

“It might cut into our time together,” she said, aware that time wasn’t the real reason she felt this trepidation. Hux was in a sense so emotionally dependent on her, and on Ren, that the both of them spending significant amounts of time together on their own could make him jealous, and she had no reference points for that end of his emotional range. 

“I don’t think so,” Hux said, aimed a brave smile at Ren. “You’ll probably be seeing me a lot more than you do presently because Kylo is going to move in with me until he’s better.”

“I’m going to what?” Ren turned his head sharply to look at Hux, winced a little as the movement pulled against the fresh sutures under his bandages. 

“Do you think you can live in your studio one-handed, with your cracked ribs and no peripheral vision on your right side?” Hux asked Ren, gently, with another brief kiss at the knuckles of his right hand. 

“Point,” Ren said with an exhausted, goofy smile. “Yeah.” 

—

A small woman, slightly past middle age, stepped into Ren’s hospital room at a quarter to two, and Rey guessed immediately that she was his mother - there was a strong family resemblance in her cheekbones and the set of her eyes, which were as dark and flashing as Ren’s. Her hair had started to go gray, but there was still enough brown in it to show Rey where Ren had inherited his coloration from.

“Ben,” the woman mouthed, glancing at Ren, who had dozed off yet again, and Rey stood quietly from the chair she had been sitting in. 

“He’s been napping on and off,” Rey said softly, “the painkillers make him drowsy.” Rey saw Hux standing in the doorway behind Ren’s mother, holding what looked to be her suitcase. The thin, pinched line of his mouth suggested that he was in pain, and Rey fervently hoped that he had not thrown his back out helping Ren’s mother with her luggage. 

“I see. I’m Leia Organa, Ben’s mother,” the woman murmured to Rey less out of gentleness and more out of a reluctance to wake her son, “and who might you be?” 

“I’m Rey Evington,” Rey said, “I’m his intern. Please, take my chair, it’s easier for him to chat if you’re on his left side.” 

Leia Organa stepped softly around the end of Ren’s bed and sat slowly down in the chair Rey had indicated, and then reached out to stroke her son’s face with a gentle hand. “Oh, Ben,” she sighed, taking in the hospital gown, the ID bracelet on his wrist, the IV lines, the splint and the bandages, “what have you gotten yourself into this time?” 

Ren stirred briefly at the sound of her voice and smiled drowsily up at her. “Hi, mom,” he rasped softly. The opiates dried his mouth out and left him sounding like he smoked a pack of unfiltered clove cigarettes a day. “I’m sorry you had to fly all the way here from LA for this.” 

“Armitage Hux told me what happened,” Leia said just a little stiffly, “when he drove me here. I’m sorry to hear about your friends.” 

“So am I.” The solidity in Ren’s face began to crumble, and then he started to weep like a small child. Leia brushed the tears away from his cheeks with her fingertips until Rey handed her a tissue from the pack in her purse. 

This was the first time Ren had done more than just hint at his sorrow in the wake of his accident, and Rey read the absolute trust that he had in his mother, envied him almost bitterly. She could not remember a time where it had been okay to cry in front of her parents - not especially when they had been drinking, and she remembered swallowing her tears and turning her face to the wall as a very small child so they would not see her weep and give her a real reason to cry. 

Hux made a small sound of discomfort as he stood near the doorway, and Rey stepped up to his side and took Leia’s suitcase from him. “Sit,” she told him, “I can tell you’re hurting.” 

Hux let out a long, slow breath. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Ms. Organa,” he said evenly afterwards, “but shall I leave your suitcase? I was going to give you both some privacy.” 

Leia looked up from her battered son into his lover’s face, and Rey read a welter of conflicting emotions flickering and fading in her eyes - pain and distaste and a paradoxical trust. “Bring it with you, please, Armitage. You’re going to drive me to the hotel, after all.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” Hux said, clipped and correct, before he let Rey usher him out of Ren’s room. He let out a long, low breath as though sighing in exhaustion and relief once they were out of earshot. “That went well.” 

“Why, did you expect things not to go well?” Rey asked him, as he leaned briefly against the cold wall in the hallway outside. 

“Leia Organa used to be a member of the US Senate,” Hux said as he retrieved a pill bottle from a coat pocket, dry-swallowed his medication, “but I’m sure you know her better for what she presently does.”

“She runs an NGO, doesn’t she, for - oh.” Leia Organa worked very publicly against arms proliferation, and Rey put two and two together at last. “Your dad - “ 

“Was a dealer in death, yes,” Hux said stiffly, his composure fragile over the intensity of his gaze, green eyes very bright in the merciless fluorescent lights above. “I know her professionally,” Hux continued, making no reference to what exactly he did in said profession, “but I’ve always felt that she doesn’t approve of me on a personal level. Kylo’s far too nice to say anything to me about it, but I know our - my affair with him has strained his relationship with his mum.” 

“This professional acquaintance,” Rey said slowly, “it wouldn’t have anything to do with what Ms. Organa currently does, does it?” 

Hux sighed again, pushed himself off the wall. “I suppose I would have to tell you sooner or later. Dissolving my father’s company was only the beginning, for me,” he said, his voice sinking to a whisper pitched only to her ears. “I’ve spent the past eight years trying to dismantle his legacy by any means possible.” 

“Why wouldn’t she like you, then,” Rey asked, slightly confused, “if you share the same goals?” 

“Because Ms. Organa is too moral and upstanding a person to actually condone my methods, and I cannot actually blame her.” Hux looked at Rey with a desperate pain in his eyes, a kind of wild fear, and she put Leia’s suitcase down, took his hand in both of hers to reassure him. “I learned many things as my father’s sole heir, things that he never wanted anyone else to find out. I know where the bodies are buried, and more importantly, I know who they used to be, how they died, and _who did it._ ” 

“That can’t be safe to know,” Rey said dumbly, “not those kinds of secrets.” 

“I’ve already said more than I should,” Hux murmured, and then Rey was hugging him, pulling him close in an attempt to express the sorrow she felt at the hurt in his face, at the visual of him destroying his inheritance one secret at a time. Hux stiffened against Rey, halfway into the embrace, and Rey feared that she had hurt his back, then realized that he was standing far too still for that to be the case. She let go of him and turned to look over her shoulder to find Leia Organa standing by the door to Ren’s hospital room, staring at them, her eyes bright with dislike. 

“Does my son know that his lover and his intern are sleeping together behind his back?” Leia asked Rey, asked the both of them, coldly and furiously polite, and Rey felt a wave of anger swell bright and hot within her chest. She had spent too much of the past two days being kind and comforting and nurturing, and the unreasonable part of her raged at the unfairness of Leia’s assessment. 

“Kylo does in fact know about this because I have been fucking Armitage Hux for longer than I’ve been his intern, and if you actually asked him about it he’d confirm it,” Rey said slowly and evenly, making an effort to keep her voice low. 

Leia flinched just a little at the tear in Rey’s voice as she recognized the blend of exhaustion and indignation in Rey’s face and body language, read the pain in the way Hux remained silent, and Rey felt suddenly oddly protective of him - as though she were the millionaire, the one who knew all the dangerous secrets. She stood staring silently at Leia for a second, and then another, and Leia dipped her head, breaking the moment. 

“I believe I’ll be taking a cab to my hotel,” Leia said as she retrieved her suitcase, more polite but no less frosty. “Excuse me,” she continued, and Rey let her leave, held on to Hux’s bony wrist through the fabric of his coat and shirt, his cufflink cold against the palm of her hand. 

“You didn’t have to - “ Hux began to say, and then he fell silent as he reconsidered the wisdom of his actions, given her current mood.

“I wanted to,” Rey said simply. She gave him her arm, and he leaned heavily on her as she led him back to Ren’s room, to the chairs she knew she would find there. “Have you got your pain medication on you?” she asked him, to change the subject.

“Yes, yes, I do,” Hux said softly, bit back a groan as he sat gratefully in the chair to Ren’s right.

“Good,” Rey said. 

Ren had turned his head to look at her, turned his face even further to study the unease in Hux’s face and body language. “Don’t tell me. My mom said something stupid,” he said. 

“It’s nothing,” Hux said, shaking his head as he patted his pockets down for another one of his pill bottles. 

“Your feelings aren’t nothing, ‘Tage,” Ren said wearily. He shifted in his bed, reached up with his left hand to grab the railing preventing him from falling out while under large amounts of opiates, hauled himself to a more satisfactory position. “I love my mom a lot, but she doesn’t understand me, you know, and if she can’t understand me then she won’t understand you, either of you.” 

“She thinks we’re cheating on you,” Rey said, trying to keep her voice light. It came out more as bitter sarcasm than flippancy. 

“Aw, fuck,” Ren said with a flat, exhausted laugh, “not again.” 

“Not again?” Somehow it did not surprise Rey that such a thing had happened before. 

“I’m sorry, guys. She just …” Ren paused, tried to find the correct words to say, “her idea of non-monogamous relationships kinda goes back to the whole free love thing.” He lifted his good hand, flailed briefly at a failed attempt to clarify with a gesture. “It was a lot sleazier than you’d think, wound up being another way to pressure women into sex when they didn’t want to, so she has weird ideas about my non-exclusi- exclusive - uh, my being poly. I’ll talk to her,” he offered, “if only because she really needs to stop shovel-talking everyone around me. I’m 31 years old, I can handle myself.”

—

Rey did not see Leia Organa again. Instead she got a phone call late Thursday afternoon, while she was hammering away at an essay she hadn’t managed to finish because of her derailed weekend. “Ms. Rey Evington?” Leia said, on the other end of the line, and Rey sighed silently to herself, braced herself for more unpleasantness. 

“I’m here, yes,” Rey said. She turned sideways in her chair at the dining table so she could look away from her laptop screen, her textbooks and notes and references. The letters were beginning to swarm in her vision, and she pondered making herself another hot cup of tea. 

“Ben gave me your phone number, and I’m calling to apologize to you,” Leia said, and Rey wasn’t sure to laugh at Kylo Ren’s promptness or just burst into tears from the stress and exhaustion pummeling at her from all angles. She didn’t want Leia to hear her cry, wasn’t entirely sure why. 

“I - okay,” Rey said, fighting to keep her voice level, “I don’t know if this is a good time to talk.” 

“I truly am sorry, Rey,” Leia said, sounding genuinely contrite. “I was worried about Ben, and I’d had a rough flight, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.” 

Rey felt her nose prickling and blinked the tears away - at least Leia couldn’t see her crying, not like this. “I’m not the one you need to make this apology to, ultimately,” she said at last, once she was sure she could speak without betraying her feelings. “You don’t know how hard it’s been for Armitage to be in a hospital with his post-traumatic stress disorder, and he’s been there for Kylo every day, since he heard about the accident.” 

Leia was silent for a few moments, and Rey thought she had overstepped her bounds, expected Leia to hang up. She decided to keep talking, assuming that she had nothing to lose, in this case. “He loves your son,” Rey said, realizing that it was true, “and it’s so hard for him to even allow himself to be vulnerable enough to love. This would normally be none of my business, but Kylo’s my friend, and so is Armitage, and I - “ Rey faltered to a stop, hesitated, realizing that she really had stepped in it this time. 

“No, no, you’re right,” Leia said at last, her voice surprisingly soft and gentle. “You love them too, don’t you, Rey? I can hear it in your voice.” 

“I don’t know what it means to love someone like that,” Rey said, ambivalent and unsurprised that she was spilling her guts messily to Ren’s mother, “but I care about them, I’m very fond of them and if that counts, then yes, I love them.” She just could not bring herself to give any more fucks in this situation.

“I know,” Leia said. “My apology can’t possibly make up for how I misjudged you - the both of you, on Sunday.” 

“No, it can’t,” Rey agreed, a trifle cruelly against the freshness of her pain and anger, “but if you really want to try making up for things, I suggest you invite Armitage for dinner and just - listen to him. Listen to what he has to say. He’s so sure you hate him, you know, because of who his father is. And his dad’s an arsehole, but he’s trying so very hard to be everything his father never was.” 

Leia was quiet again, and Rey waited in the silence of the dead air for her answer. “That all depends on whether he’ll even talk to me now, won’t it?” she said, and Rey could hear the sadness in her voice even through the distance of the cellular line.

“It will, yes,” Rey said, “but you owe it to him and to Kylo to try.” 

—

Rey retreated to bed after Leia hung up - she was crying too hard to continue working on her essay, in any case. She could not correctly articulate or identify why she hurt so much inside. Instead she hid under the duvet and hugged her spare pillow, inhaled the faint ghosts of Hux’s pomade and cologne off its surface. The smells comforted her, and she imagined herself leaning against his shoulder, safe and warm in his bed.

She remained there until Rose came home from her shift at the garage in Islington where she worked as a car mechanic, at which point she stuck her head out from under the covers when Rose came in to check on her. 

“You left your laptop on the dining table,” Rose said, perching herself on the edge of Rey’s bed, “and you almost never do that, so either you’re not feeling well, or something’s wrong. Looks like both, in this case. Is there anyone you need me to talk to?”

“No,” Rey said, knowing that she wasn’t strictly being truthful with Rose, but Kylo Ren would probably object to Rose’s idea of ‘talking to’ especially where his mother was concerned. The process usually involved a large socket wrench, some blistering profanity, and optional violence if the first two items didn’t work. 

“It’s not him, is it?” Rose asked, referring indirectly to Hux.

“No,” Rey said, “I’m just stressed-out.” But the tears kept coming, and she buried her face in the pillow again, furious at how wretched she felt. 

“Right,” Rose said, her expression skeptical. “Fine. Is there anything I can do for you, right now?” 

“I just need some time alone,” Rey said, and she rolled away from Rose to face the other side of her bed, still clutching the pillow against her chest. 

—

Rey missed school Friday. She forgot to turn her alarm clock on, and simply didn’t have the wherewithal to crawl out of bed when she woke up late. There was something building within her gut and her soul that made her feel heartsick and terrified, and she was afraid to probe her feelings further, sure that something awful lurked beneath the hurt. 

Rose found her still in bed when she came back from work. “Rey,” she said, “I’m starting to worry about you. I’d ask Paige to sort you out, but she’s in Munich right now. What happened yesterday?” 

“I don’t know,” Rey said wretchedly. Something about the conversation with Leia had left her feeling raw and full of broken glass, and she lacked the vocabulary to articulate why. 

Rose’s expression was uncharacteristically serious, her skin pale under the warmth of her constant tan. “Hux didn’t - hurt you, did he?” she asked slowly, as though also fearing the truth.

“No,” Rey would have laughed bitterly at the assumption, had she the strength to. “He’s been too busy to call me this week, let alone see me. Nothing’s happened.” 

“So, you miss him?” Rose suggested. She reached out and patted Rey on the shoulder, and Rey couldn’t hold the tears back any more. She wept into her pillow and closed her eyes for a few moments until she found her breath again. 

“I don’t know,” Rey said. _I don’t want to know,_ she thought, and the fear and guilt drove a cold spike into the pit of her belly, left her faintly nauseous. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she felt as though she were standing at the very edge of a train platform, that she would topple onto the rails if she took another step.

“Have you eaten?” Rose asked. Rey shook her head limply in reply.

“Right. I’m going to make a cup of tea and bring you some biscuits,” Rose said, matter of factly. “Can you at least manage that?” 

“Yes,” Rey said, hoping to be left alone more than she wanted the cup of tea. 

“Okay,” Rose said doubtfully, “I’ll be back.” 

—

The cup of tea went cold, the biscuits ignored, and Rey lay miserably awake in bed until a knock sounded at the door of the flat. She heard Rose speak to someone, and then the door to her room opened a sliver. Hux glanced in at her curled up in bed, and then pushed the door fully open to step in. Rey blinked the tears out of her eyes, shivered a little in surprise as she saw Ren limping in behind him, and then the door shut behind them. 

Ren wore his coat like a cape to accommodate the sling holding his splinted arm close to his chest, and he moved stiffly like a scarecrow, fresh bandages taped over the right side of his face. 

“Sweet Rey,” Hux murmured. He sat down on the edge of her bed where Rose had been earlier. “Your flatmate called me on your phone. She told me you weren’t well. What’s the matter?” 

“I don’t know,” Rey said desperately, and then her hurt didn’t matter as much because Ren was stretching himself carefully down on the empty side of her bed, coat, sling and all. The leather of his coat creaked softly as he moved. 

“Was it something my mom said to you?” Ren asked Rey, utterly seriously. “She said she was going to apologize. I hope she did.” He smelled faintly of disinfectant, and Rey wondered how long he had been out of hospital at this point, felt a pang of guilt at the thought of him coming all the way here just to see her while she blubbered.

Rey found herself shaking as she rolled over to face Ren, found his good left arm in front of her face. 

“It’s okay to hold on to me, if you want,” Ren told her, “I have a good shoulder for crying on, and my left side doesn’t hurt.” 

“Go ahead,” Hux told her as she looked up to him for permission, “I know for a fact it’s true. Kylo’s very comforting to cry on.” Ren was, after all, his boyfriend, not hers. 

The misery welled up like vomit in Rey’s soul at the thought, and she let Ren gather her carefully in his good arm, let her head rest on his shoulder as the words began to spill involuntarily out of her. “I don’t want to do this any more,” she said brokenly, unsure of who she was saying this to. “I don’t want to - Armitage, I don’t want to take your money any more.” 

Rey felt Hux flinch beside her as though he had been struck, but he remained silent. He only reached out to her and placed a careful hand on her shoulder, rubbing gently at her flesh while she cried against the soft, worn leather of Ren’s coat. 

“Why don’t you, Rey?” Ren asked her, when neither she nor Hux said anything more. “What happened with my mom?” She could sense a kind of rage building up within Ren, coiling like tension in the breadth of his chest as he drew her closer to him. 

“She - she told me that she could see I loved you. That I loved you both.” Rey shivered despite the warmth of the covers, despite Ren’s comforting solidity against her. “And she’s right. I do.” 

Hux’s hand tightened on Rey’s shoulder, the grip almost bruising, but the ache grounded her, made it easier for her to look down at the tangle of emotions in her breast. “Armitage,” she said, turning away from Ren to look at Hux, where he sat so very still at the edge of her bed, “I want to be yours. And I mean yours without - without any compensation, without any conditions." 

“I don’t know what to say to that,” Hux murmured, and Rey read a kind of confusion and hurt in his expression. “I - “ 

“I still want to see you,” Rey said to reassure him, her fingers closing on his right thigh, on the wool of his trousers. “I don’t want to stop. I just want to be sure I’m doing this of my own free will, not just because it’s convenient.”

Hux did not say anything in reply. Instead he swung his legs up onto the bed and lay carefully on his side, and Rey found herself sandwiched between him and Ren. It was a close fit - her own bed wasn’t as immense as Hux’s was, but there was something incredibly comforting about being held by the both of them. Had her parents ever let her sleep in their bed when she was small? She could no longer remember, doubted it somehow. 

“I don’t know how to love properly, Rey,” Hux murmured at last, once she had settled herself back down on Ren’s shoulder. Hux kissed her softly on the back of her head, and his breath stirred the hair on the nape of her neck. 

“It’s okay,” she whispered against Ren’s coat, “neither do I. Which is why I’m so scared. I’m still afraid you’re going to tell me you don’t want my feelings, only my body.” 

“No - “ Hux murmured in mingled shock and denial, his voice hissing as he, too, began to weep, his chest heaving against Rey’s back. “No, no - don’t cry, please. I desire you, yes, but I also want you in my life, all of you, the complexity of you, of your wit and your kindness.” 

“S’okay,” Ren told Hux, told her. “It’s okay to cry, the both of you. That’s what’s wrong with us, humans, I mean. We don’t let our feelings out enough and it’s like a tumor inside, poisons your soul.” 

“Oh, Kylo,” Hux sighed, his arm sliding around Rey’s waist to hold her closer to his chest, “whatever am I going to do now, with you, with Rey?” 

Ren shut his eyes and sighed, clearly weary. “I’m still on too much medication to be wise and meditative about love. It’s a messy emotion, anyway, because the human experience is a fucking trainwreck. But I suggest we all just keep loving each other until we get shit figured out. If we don’t, then we’ll still have loved each other. And if we do, then we haven’t wasted any time.”

“How do you have all the answers, Kylo?” Rey asked him without really expecting an answer.

“I don’t,” he said easily as she shifted against him, against Hux. “I’m just so high on opiates that I can afford to be optimistic about complicated shit. Better living through chemistry.” 

They lay in silence for a few minutes, and Rey felt herself calming slightly with all this warmth around her, listening to their breathing in the safety of her bed. 

“You really should just come stay with us for a bit, Rey, until the end of term,” Ren offered after she had managed to stop crying, “I shouldn’t be left unsupervised while I’m on these painkillers, and you probably shouldn’t be left alone when you’re so depressed. We can all take care of each other for a week or two. What do you think, ‘Tage?” 

“It’s not as though I would dare to kick you out of my flat, Kylo. Your mother would murder me. And you know you’re always welcome in my home, dear Rey,” Hux murmured.

“And in your bed,” Rey added, finally finding the strength inside her to be witty again. She took his hand in both of hers, stroked the knuckles of his hand with light brushes of her fingertips

“Well, that goes without saying,” Hux laughed brittly, pressed another kiss against the back of Rey’s head, his breath warm against her skin, “and I can drive you to school so you won’t have to get up as early in the morning.” 

“On one condition,” Rey said, as she began to sit up in bed. She tucked her knees to her chest, watched the two men flanking her so closely, both welcome in different ways. Ren was charcoal and graphite against Hux’s watercolor flush, the both of them equal and important in such different ways. 

“What would that be?” Hux asked, genuinely curious. 

“I want you to stop drawing my portrait, Kylo Ren,” Rey said, glad that her voice sounded adequately steady. “I can’t sleep in the same bed with you and not fuck you, and you told me you don’t sleep with your models.” 

Ren laughed once, sharply, before he stopped and winced. “Ow,” he groaned, “my fucking ribs, fuuck.” 

“I’m so sorry,” Rey gasped, her own tears forgotten in her alarm at Ren’s pain, but he waved her apology off with a sheepish smile. 

“You might have to wait, anyway,” Ren reminded her, “I’m still a bit fragile for anything strenuous.” 

“I’ll be gentle,” Rey said. She found her wicked grin, was relieved to be able to wear it again, and Ren took her hand in his, kissed the back of it softly, his breath lingering hot against her skin. 

“I’ll hold you to that,” he said.


End file.
